T'Sei
by 7.Saavikam
Summary: With Spock's life beginning again, everything changes. On Genesis, love and life and death are created furiously in days. Saavik, faced with memory, loss, and lives created, is torn between Genesis and Vulcan, her memories, her daughter, and her past.
1. Part I: Genesis

"I'll go…I'll go check the records in the medical hall, thank you, Captain." She was babbling, she knew it, but before the Captain could even think through her speech, she was gone. Hurrying unusually for a Vulcan, even half-Romulan, Kirk thought, blinking, and more erratically than gracefully. What the hell was up with Lieutenant Saavik? Beneath her calm surface, she seemed almost perturbed, shaken, about something, which, with Vulcans, he knew, meant she was much more shaken than a human would be. He almost raised an eyebrow, then belatedly felt the sadness, the emptiness punch through him. A Captain shouldn't cry. Not even if that Captain was on a compromised mission when his crewmember—no, Jim—his first officer—his friend, his goddamn whatever-that-Vulcan-world-was, died. Captains should take losses and then function properly. Captains should not be emotionally compromised, should not be…When he could look up properly again, Saavik was nowhere to be found.

In fact, she was in one of the sparse, hard-to-find useless rooms on the Enterprise, the ones the building crew kept forgetting to remove because the rooms, smaller than closets, were hidden by such confounding twists and turns you could almost swear they couldn't be found on such a straightforward-ly built ship, face to face with something that looked suspiciously like a mop and a couple of old coats. She couldn't tell, however; her vision swam before her, lit and made prismatic by tears. The sobs were almost disturbing Saavik; it was like she wasn't even part of her own body, like this was someone else. _Or maybe you're just afraid to face the self like this; maybe this is what you're really like, Saavik._ She blinked, glared furiously at the wall and tried not to think, all the while unable to stop the flood of heat and water, finally settling into an exhausted dead-black sleep.

A sharp sound woke her; she quite forgot her training in all matters and shot upwards in surprise, hitting her head with a sound like a gunshot. Saavik winced; the wince pulled at the strange stiffness of dried tears on her face. Oh. She was mortified, almost blushed a deep green, tried to hide behind the ratty old Earth coats in the tiny room.

"What the hell?" someone swore. By the accent, McCoy. _Great_, she thought. "…is with this room?" McCoy continued, glaring and rubbing his head. He thought he could make out in the darkness, though that Romulan ale—something shifted. No, some_one_, some_one_ breathing at a familiar rate that definitely was not human.

"Saavik, what the hell are you doing in he—" he began, then saw her tearstained face and was astounded. _Oh god._

"I hit my head on the ceiling," she intoned, "and that is why." The intelligence of her face, even after crying, pushed the questionable intelligence of her argument out of his mind. Never mind that she looked miserable and could barely think. She sprung out of the room, ducking past McCoy, and rushed away.

Saavik removed herself to her quarters a while. All was darkness, in space she stared out to; all was darkness between the points of light.

—

"You used unstable particles to form Genesis?" Saavik couldn't help the feeling of betrayal that coursed through her. It was completely irrational, but she thought this planet and its wonders could last forever, and David had ruined that completely.

David walked past her to the campsite, then turned. His eyes were alight. "I'm sorry," he said, and put two fingers to her lips. Saavik almost laughed; he couldn't know what that meant. Even if he had, she realized, he wouldn't have taken it back. She felt rejection of him snap through her eyes, tried to look away so he wouldn't see it or the uncontrolled blush of green that swept across her cheeks. She hunkered down to the planet floor, pulling the blanket tightly about the snow-sodden shoulders of her uniform; Genesis was cold, even for a half-Vulcan body.

The firelight flickered. She could sense him from her peripheral vision but couldn't stop him, his lips descending on hers warmly. Saavik blinked. She was a mature woman, but she couldn't have guessed, well, _this. _

"David, I'm not trying to pursue a human relationship," she said, but so quietly he couldn't be sure if he heard. He couldn't even guess at the weight of those words, their significance, or what ran through her mind as she turned away. Saavik was silent, watching the shadows the light made on the walls of the cave, thinking of the stars, darkness and light, life and death.

The Past

Saavik looked down at the sprawled form of young Spock, half shadowed by the cave walls, trying to ignore her aching body and the shuddering spasms that tore through her. Was the air getting warmer? It swept, unbearably hot, against her skin, a great pressure becoming heat waves that rolled across her body. Her forehead, breasts and belly were beaded with sweat, and her face was tinged an unhealthy gray-green from exhaustion. _Focus_, she thought. _Your bruises don't matter, your pain and love don't matter. Not even Genesis, not anymore. Only him. He must live. _

She moved closer to him, unaware of further scrapes across her legs as her knees brushed stone. He lay with outflung arms and legs, as if he could not move; as she neared him, Saavik marveled at the resemblance in his younger features to the older, comfortable Spock she knew, his eyebrows strong and slanted exactly the same, his cheekbones mirror images to the ones she remembered, his eyes a little larger and his lips the same but, this time, known—unbidden, a flush crept furiously across her cheeks—and parted without the restraint normally seen in Vulcans. Of course, Spock was not himself; his soul resided elsewhere for safekeeping, in someone's mind somewhere along the stars, for all had thought him dead.

As she neared even more, she snapped back to awareness, saw that he could not move because of the pain he was in; he was bound by it. She pressed two fingers against his forehead; the coolness of it shocked her; this was not right—but then he flared burning hot and hazily focused on her face. His mouth slid open a little more; he breathed out as if to speak, then frowned; he didn't know words. But this feverish youth did not need words; pain like fire beat at him, though he now controlled his screams inwardly—before, Saavik had tightly shut her eyes at his cries of anguish, for she had been unable to help—he was too young—only to try and wildly hope that he could hold on to her presence as the slightest comfort in his turbulent awakening to the accelerated hell that was pon farr—what was supposed to happen only every seven years to Vulcans, and with preparation and meditation to ease it, then a companion to ease the edge, and most of all, with thought and consciousness, she thought fiercely, but what now gripped Spock in the space of a day. His eyes pleaded, burned in her vision with unfocused agony. She had no time to think of the urge to comfort, the basic instinct to take him in her arms and simply hold him, and expected the weakness of a child as she saw his arm lift upward to her face, but his hand was hard as bone, tore with fervor past her hair after slipping along her cheekbone, trailing desire, as he brought two fingers to lay against her own in perfect symmetry.

She would forever remember the fire, the breathlessness of him. She was unprepared for the fear that tore into her consciousness as his mind linked with hers—

_Alone, in a galaxy of unknown things, unnamable, happiness, pain, change, light-dark-green-day-sun-life-plants-stone-snow-age-found-wordless-stars-sadness-longing… Alone! _

She gasped, hot tears spilling from her eyes, and gripped his hand tighter. Saavik wasn't sure if he could even sense her presence beyond the knowledge of the raw need that engulfed him rapidly until he was almost further senseless, blind as an animal, helpless as an infant, rough as an untrained man—but the bond of skin upon skin, the memories she tried to remind him of…

_We are connected. You are safe._ Her hand against his, she stressed in her mind. _Always, if you…if you want me._ His face contorted, and she thought he would weep, but the solid bulk of his body pressed against her own as he gripped her hand more tightly, unsure of what could ease this small death and rebirth that heralded the start of another accelerated seven years. His eyes flashed like sudden sparks before her face, so briefly she was startled by their liquid depths, the expressiveness he had even without words, without thoughts or memory—the anguish, the recognition—before his hot mouth latched onto hers, breathlessly, eagerly, frustratedly tearing at her lip as his hands moved around and didn't know where to move. She pulled away from him for a moment, dizzily took in his eyes, and, looking down while he moved forward and forward again, clearly not understanding why she had separated her mouth from his—she ran a finger along his finger, but he cried out roughly, in pain still—Saavik ripped her jacket and soft shirt away and fumbled with her pants. Still with her fingers to his fingers, her eyes seeing his eyes, she brought her mouth to his mouth again, kissed him with such sadness that she wondered if he would ever remember his past and this combined, brought her arms around his thin chest. As he ducked his head downward, nipped at her collarbone, her side, all of her, inflamed…His legs wrapped tightly around hers, his mouth once again grasped at hers. His arms were hard as bars, bruising her back as he crushed into her chest—small flames against the larger fire as her breasts protested at this proximity—and latched his hips against her own, penetrating her in one swift movement. The sweat shone across his brow, the rictus of pain and desire in his face imprinted in her mind. And still, she felt tears in her eyes; his hand was still in hers even as he kissed her again and again, even as he tore into her and she screamed and wept. The fire was unbearable, white-hot. She flung her loose arm out senselessly, escaping the burning, felt a sharp, shattering impact, bone-deep, then shuddered into the warmth and proximity she felt. But the fire pulsed through her, tore and ripped and drank at her savagely. His pain, his confusion, his final satisfaction rolled through her with such intensity that she forgot she was Saavik, forgot all.

_Not alone._

Saavik was only distantly aware of no longer shivering, hazily confused at the cold air that somehow didn't bother her. She awoke to the change of temperature. The weak sun's sudden arc across the sky formed a line of fire in the sky so that the cave was alit with red. Sunrise slanted over sharp cheekbones—Spock. Saavik sat up, wondered at the sensitivity of her skin—saw the pale luminescence of her nakedness against the darkness of the cave just as she saw the face of the young Vulcan who lay asleep and vulnerable, whose hand in hers filled her with the unbearable, confusing aftershock of passion and fierce protectiveness. She frowned then winced; her body ached, bone-deep, to where the pain surfaced in unbearable red-hot points where she saw the beginnings of bruises form.

Naked, looking like she'd been through a hell of a fight or a sickness or something, staring down at herself with shock, unable to tear her hand away from Spock's as if he were a sick child—no, a lover—this is what David Marcus walked in upon.

Saavik heard a softly muffled exclamation from the mouth of the cave and immediately wished she could move from where she lay painfully. David's hair and face were lit on one side spreading to the other by the unnaturally fast sunrise.

"What the hell happened here? Saavik, what the f—"

"I suppose I should have told you at a more opportune time, Sa—" David broke off, swallowed. His eyes filled, his large fists clenched. He could not duck his head, only stare at what he always hoped he would see but not like this and not with him, found he could not even say her name and that frustrated tears pricked at his eyes from an overwhelming anger. Anger that overwhelmed desire and anguish. "Genesis is destroying itself." He was faced with an incalculatable gaze; even—as she was—her eyes were so composed, so alien in their composure, _so beautiful_, a tiny part of himself whispered.

_That's it. Don't look at her body, her—just at her face. _

He swallowed and inadvertently stepped back, eyes wide. Saavik was _crying_. He would have missed it if he saw her thin, compact body right then. "God, David, would you help me up?" He flushed and gripped her arm until she stood, struggling to compose her face, crossing her arms over her breasts and swaying a little wearily. Saavik shifted her weight to one foot, then another, found she could stand. The darkness and lightening air revealed a slight curve, a flash of her side, as she bent down and pressed her lips to the Vulcan's forehead. His eyes were shut tight as a newborn's, and his face still looked pained, though _not alone_ was the last feeling she had sensed from him, their connection wide as an open wound, a new world. Reluctantly she slid her fingers away from his.

"He dreamed of dawn," she realized she was saying to David. "I don't know if he understands, but he caught a glimpse of my—mind, the outside world—" She looked down. When she looked up, she saw that David was almost glaring and crying at once.

"Good. Whatever. It's not as if—" He just turned from her, the body language saying even more than the words. Saavik felt as if an emptiness had been punched through her—Spock wouldn't remember, wasn't himself, and David—

"Fine," she said, feeling her control slip. As she hadn't since she was a child on a strange new world, Vulcan, she ran, bitter tears flying behind her.

Not since Hellguard had she felt this way, so very young and so very old at once, with so many experiences left behind and such a terrifying new world ahead of her. Spock probably wouldn't remember any of it, and David…She clenched her fingers around one of the tall, green fronds around her that smelled like a world made anew by rain.

"How could you have done this to him?" she said, quietly, picturing David in her mind, the pale fire of his hair, the brighter fire of his smile, and the slow studiousness of him that overtook his face, body and movements whenever he was lost in thought, the intelligence of him curiously reminiscent of a Vulcan, not a human, but colored by incomprehensible passion and emotion. The darkness in her mental landscape made David stand out like, yes, fire: fire that burned away Spock, tore into the newborn man, threatened to destroy the life he had begun anew here.

"He would be dead, if otherwise, if I hadn't," she whispered even more quietly, voice pensive. As she had been in the realm of feeling before, now the realm of thought overtook her; she parted her fingers then looked up to the stars that stung wildly from the lightening dawn of the sky of Genesis.

She had to go back. Darkness had fallen once again, merging all forms into obscurity she picked silently through, yet she knew when she had reached the cave; the firelight flickered in shadows and light, but even before she reached that threshold, she heard a voice raw with pain. Then, sudden in her vision, she came upon David, who crouched by the fire as in great pain with his hands tense. Spock lay, older, still in the cave, but the veins stood out on the soft green-grey of his skin; he rocked with tension, and his eyes were bright with agony and fever. He hurled a hand out to grip hers like a lifeline, and with such intensity she was overtaken by the tumult of his mind:

_No words. He knew no words. Before, there had been pain, but it left. Why did it not leave now? Fire, darkness, days…Alone! Together and still alone. _

Gasping, reeling, she knelt, winced at the scrape of stone, unseeingly removed the blanket from around her shoulders, and brought a hand up to Spock's face; her touch shocked against burning skin.

Her hand on his hand was her only connection to sanity, to consciousness. She was only aware of the burning as she forgot all surroundings, but before this, she bent her head to his and desperately kissed him. Before all was heat and confusion, she felt the bitter tears fall and the absence of the mind like an open wound, the thoughts and memories she knew and loved, the mind somewhere among the stars though the body was here and aflame—the man she gave all for to save.

There were no words, not exactly, in his mind, but it lacked the singular pain and wisdom that structured, made terrible and awe-inspiring the Spock she knew. This younger, empty Spock had felt a strange sadness when she parted from him before, but he could not possibly know her heartbreak and her own agony so removed from the physical kind. Saavik felt the ache in her bones, the bruises, the nausea and yes, the desire, and thought bleakly that this was not all. She would sacrifice all to save him, if she could—even this strange, newborn side of him, this twin-like reappearance, this empty, younger man she already felt a wild connection, almost maternal and deeply sad, to, would save too if she could. Yet, though like a child, even he could hurt her, beyond any physical way.

He would never remember this, when he became himself again. All of it would be wiped clean, a distant part of herself realized. And all the meaning, he could never even guess. She would be torn in two, unable to speak a word of it. Dimly, she thought, even in joy, this brief different joy the young, practically newborn Vulcan could never understand the implications of, of a great sadness, a great emptiness. The death of Spock and the new life he would remember nothing of.

The young one dreamed of darkness, a great wondering darkness, greater than understanding, and almost felt recognition, a brief bond, before feeling anguish he could not understand, a pain not his own. He woke and looked up at the other one, could not understand the thoughts in her eyes. He brought a hand up to her face, hesitantly, but the expression remained. Confused, hurt by her hurt, he wrapped thin arms around thin legs tightly and buried his face in his kneecaps, then stared out to the vast open covering of the world, at the light in the darkness, seeing David but not knowing.

The eyes of David Marcus reflected bright from the fire. He had wandered off, that night, unable to leave entirely for he feared what could happen if there were other life forms on the planet, ones not entirely friendly, and if they encountered Saavik and—and _him_—in the state they were in, could not break out of. He had gone there first to respect their privacy, though this was futile, for thoughts fought angrily in his mind, battered their wings against his consciousness, and he could not forget. Greater, raw fire flowered in the near distance as darkness lightened unnaturally towards day, sunrise heralded by great angry colors almost greater than the size of the sky. As he stared out to the turbulent, born-and-at-once-dying landscape, the fiery wounds of Genesis not creating but destroying it, he felt suddenly young, insignificant, as if the plans he had made, the ideas postulated, were the smallest of particles and ridiculous.

He had seen the angry, new yet healing strangely fast bruises along Saavik's legs, hadn't tried to but the contrast of her skin against the darkness had caught at his eyes for an instant. Had seen as she bent down to kiss this seemingly same but different—so different, like a child but in pain and so much harder to understand—Spock, had almost seen her eyes, the complexity of the feelings she could only reveal there. Had looked away as she un-self-consciously flung away the red-and-black-checked blanket from her body. And he still could not understand, though memories had flashed through his mind unbearably: that day on the Enterprise, before they left for Genesis—Saavik's angular, strangely beautiful face as she turned away from David's uncontainable embrace, and her distant eyes as she turned. He remembered the barest V of her skin and her soaked uniform peeking above the bright folds of the blanket he'd reached for when he saw her shivering—reached for almost automatically then later wondered at; _my father had this, camping_, David had remembered for some reason, just as his mind suddenly clicked and he could read what lay in her eyes as she gazed out the turbolift to where the body of another Vulcan had recently been: that was when David realized—and it hit him forcefully—that Saavik did not love him.

There was so much he could never understand, he realized, seeing Saavik's fingers against Spock's, their unreadable, uncontrollable emotions in their eyes as their hands met. Like he had realized, though not completely, what seemed like years before.

Saavik would never love him. She was acting to save Spock's new life, but he knew, as he saw then turned away, walked to witness Genesis, that that was not all to it, could not be. She would die to save Spock, if she needed to—all this David saw, knew, without words—for the depth of what David could not understand was rooted beyond even her own life. Magma spurted upward as the planet heaved. David's eyes were suddenly fixed to the stars, their tragic clarity, the balance of beauty and sadness. In that instant, he knew, the knowledge strong and vivid through his heartbeat, he would die to save Saavik.

Love was not something that could ever entirely be understood.

"Saavik!" he thought wildly, but he couldn't warn her. Klingons had found them—the last thing David had expected. Saavik was outside the cave, her clothing painstakingly put on again, with Spock, and David could do nothing, only watch as they were captured.

And as the knife pointed to Saavik—the Klingon didn't care which one he killed, but fate—David felt not his life, but hers, flash in front of his eyes. He leaped and tackled the Klingon man, couldn't even see Saavik's eyes one last time before strong arms met strong arms and he fought, desperately, bitterly for his own life and theirs. His heartbeat seemed to span an eternity, encompass a world, and then the knife point like bitter irony went home. He died under hidden stars, with his hands open to the sky.

"How can you explain the death of my son?"

The only thing Kirk had heard was that David was dead, not why. Not how.

"He died saving us." Saavik's eyes were wide. _So much under the surface, so much more she could say._ Her eyes went to Spock, who lay again in the grip of the shattering pain that was the blood fever and his accelerated growth all at once. A shadow of pain gripped her heart.

_Saving_ me.

She studied her open hand, still in shock, though under the surface of her thoughts were galaxies and still water—and yet, if things had gone differently…

In her mind's eye was David Marcus. Her whole life gravitated toward Spock, but David…his eyes, his hair, his smile in the firelight, his openness, his humanness…he was a good man. How could he be dead? As easily as Spock had died, though David wouldn't come back.

The sun rose silver over Genesis.

She had gone to David, brushed a finger over his hand, hesitantly, though he could not breathe, move to stop her, or know.

David, who had helped her through fever—at the very beginning, when she could hardly move, had no idea what was happening—David, who was always there. Except now he was not. David, who she might have loved, if the worlds orbited differently, if the universe was not entirely the same.

And Genesis was destroying, dying.

Spock groaned, almost screamed, grabbed his head with tight knuckles, but a strange feeling shuddered through Saavik, breaking her usual calm, and her own knuckles clenched. "Excuse me, Captain," she managed before a wave of nausea made her walk quickly to the bushes and heave. She closed her eyes, brought her fingers to her temples, tried to steady herself. Strangely enough, Spock looked up at that moment, just as she did; the now-afternoon sun reflected off his eyes.

Saavik was sleeping more than usual, her sleep deeper than she remembered it usually was. The darkness seemed to almost expand, behind her closed eyelids, though she knew this was impossible—and yet, it was a curious thing; she was neither falling nor experiencing normal dreams, though when she dreamed, it was rarely. But this was different. It was as if another consciousness was reaching out to her, one that divided and changed her persective...dizzy, she lurched over to be beamed back to the ship, and quite suddenly the feeling had subsided, but still lay at the back of her memory. Even as she functioned normally, pointing her phaser-armed arm at the one remaining Klingon in the warbird the captain had captured, her mind surged in grave calculation, so much so that even the sudden tearing absence of Spock as he was taken to sickbay barely even registered in her mind.

On Vulcan again, it felt like she was a time bomb. The red-scorched heat of the place—she was used to it, but it was unsettling, after so much time in space and then on Genesis, like she was suddenly a child again—hit her with a force as she strode out of the ship she had come there on. She felt like her head was slip into two different people, one much less formed. Her eyes widened as a sudden sharp pain jerked her abdomen.

_No. This couldn't be happening…_

And yet, at the fal tor pan, with the sun rising over Vulcan, as the newly made Spock joined with his katra and then looked at the people there, looked almost past her, that same sudden pain had momentarily stunned her, and she could barely look into his face.

Amanda understood immediately. Saavik had no idea how she knew, but somehow Spock's mother guessed everything, as Saavik came to the house without the usual Vulcan calm and with a shockingly vivid pain instead on her face.

"My god, Saavik," Amanda was saying. "And he doesn't know?" Saavik shook her head. "It shouldn't have gotten in the way of my normal duties, but on the ship, I felt…odd, like something was off with the entire world—even with Spock back, his mind felt different, and I had grown accustomed to the mind of his on Genesis, all the while a small part of me"—she glanced swiftly downward—"felt fine."

In my mind, my memories, she thinks, I'm still on Genesis...

_It's rained and the boy Spock looks up with wonder, uncaring that the rain is cold and he's getting steadily wetter. The rain drips in liquid ropes from the glistening leaves. Something clicks within her as she notices the world's beauty coming forth from the senseless, heartbreaking day. "Sov-masu," she tell hims, rain, though he won't remember it._

David walks over; she can hear his footfalls. Spock is swaddled tightly, on her lap, and reaches a questing finger up to the side of her face—as it snags on a hair, Spock pouts, then twists the hair in his fist. Saavik restrains herself from wincing. But she can hear her own heartbeat: loud, strangely open, as is her gaze as David sits down.

He sees her wide eyes, the thoughts she doesn't stay. If anything, their gazes are enough of a bond—she smiles absently—parting and never parted, never and always touching and touched. It is enough so that though he wants to kiss her, feel the heat and breath of her, he simply sees her instead.

Saavik closes her eyes; against the imprint of a fire—a sudden thought, a distant possibility—in the brief darkness of Genesis, finger meets with finger, hand to hand, woman to man, to merge as the sparks flare mightily upwards, flame surging into the wind. And Spock is nowhere to be seen.

She wakes with eyes shocked wide. Something moves her, so that her usual calm is somewhat hurried, though it carries traces of unconscious grace. As the wave of violent heat and nausea passes and her body heaves, thoughts slam into her instinctual emotion and adrenaline; she truly wakes.

David is dead.

Spock is alive, but he is dead to me, though it is far worse than that in reality; he lives but does not remember. Where is the child, the man I loved? Where do the two halves meet?

She stares upward, seeing in her mind's eye not the hallway of the ship but stars that seem less distant.

What am I, without them?

An illogical question, she would say, but shaken, she only knows she must return to Vulcan. 


	2. Part II: Vulcan

The light in his eyes as he sees the child. She always noticed the strength, the line-together constancy of him, his steadfast and quiet admiration for everything around him. She, the mother, feels so human, so strangely strong. It's a surprising weakness, strength, one she lets herself feel—only briefly did she ever have to support herself against the pain, then understood everything unspoken about the Vulcan race as she looked into her tiny daughter's eyes. There was so much left to experience, Saavik thought, looking for a single burning moment upwards to be startled as she met his eyes.

"Saavikam, what is wrong?" His voice is low and deep. She cannot turn away from the look she supposes only she herself understands, then blinks away hot tears—somehow emotion has spiraled into her; she feels light, dizzy, unsure—only to see something white blurring in her far vision; she blinks and so does not see the warm confusion warring in him. T'Sei is huddled against her breast. Saavik reflects that for a moment, the air on Vulcan did not seem so warm, but rather cool, as her temperature rose precipitously in the aftermath of labor, then reflects only on her daughter's heartbeat. She has to close her eyes again furiously so as not to see him not seeing. Spock barely noticing their daughter. She rises, leans against the doorway, clutches it in human—strange, how human she feels—sadness.

Her sight, cleared into fine precision from the sudden lack of tears, registers someone very small, very old. Confused, she stares at the ears for a moment; they're rounded—_oh. Amanda._

Once again, a look of strange pain and significance crosses Saavik's features, though she is hardly aware. Without the strength to even think of Spock, she slips back under the white sheets and immediately falls into a troubled sleep.

_Running down the hill, feeling like the wind—the red dust rolling past, the clear sky above sweet as water—and it's all real! I'm finally in reality—the wind stiff in my hair until I can feel the joy of it, the clouds huge and puffy as if I could roll on them, the air a whole sea I cannot wait to jump into. It feels like swimming, like flying, like jumping into new horizons, just thinking of you. Little red dust spots pepper my face but I fling my arms out exuberantly, grinning until my face hurts. The sun is bright but I like it that way, filling my skin warmly with feeling. My steps go faster and faster, almost colliding—a slope later, a perfect day noticed later, I tear my eyes away from the clear sky to feel the joy bursting in me come forth as I fling myself into your arms. I love the strong connection, the real feeling, the skin contact—that simple assurance that you will never leave, that closest bond beyond anything that can be defined, beyond any words ever expressed. Not love, but a galaxy unnamed, bright with stars and distant futures and endless possibilities shining on us. The world is like this, rich and strange. It is something I never wish to forget._

_"Don't leave me, Spock," I say to your neck, dizzily. From amidst the heartbeat and breathing and the easy pressure of your arms, I hear the muffled reply: "Why would I ever do so?"_

_"See, look, our daughter's with us," I tell him happily, showing him the girl with her small hands in mine. Bright sparks are his eyes as he lifts her up and swirls her around. She laughs, unused to being solemn, untaught to it as of yet. I'd thought that a different environment was in store for such an uncannily mixed heritage our daughter had; she was only three-fourths Vulcan, one quarter Romulan. I had wondered, one night, reflecting from beside Spock, whether his different raising at Earth, if it had happened, would have changed him—something he'd speculated on himself and told me. He's strangely open to me, so much so that I forget sometimes he is a different being because I can feel his mind around me all the time as if it were my own. I had then wondered whether it really mattered; I loved Spock as he was. What defining of race, of planet origin, could change that? It was experiences that changed a person._

_"We can see for ourselves what a bright future she will have," I remembered—he, smiling, his eyes dark and warm and bound at the same time, as he paused in the doorway to behold the infant girl, "without the bounds of anything we have known," he had said. His mind, a welcome presence like his hand in mine, already knew I thought the same, that a strange curiosity and affection for humans and emotion pushed me to raising our daughter as one and as Vulcan at the same time, while exploring Spock's own humanity and himself as a Vulcan._

_T'Sei is like a little copy of him, the boy I saw when he aged rapidly from a younger self on Genesis—Genesis!—she has his dark eyes and his features, though more rounded, and even now her baby sounds are peppered with intelligence, and her thoughts have their own individual logic that she can give into or not as she chooses, with a surprising will. It is a strange thing, knowing the thoughts of a child before she is born, as she is in the womb—indeed, I had felt the world almost turning, in my shock, as I had realized it when Genesis was being torn apart, a fiery, cataclysmic planet in its death throes so soon after the first wonder of its creation, as Genesis was destroying itself and I was beamed back aboard the ship. As I had thought Spock would die, I felt the first heartbeat, the first tentative thought, almost felt a tiny hand move, had been shocked: like her father, T'Sei had at first been bound to the life cycle of that planet, and had grown abnormally fast until I left the surface. T'Sei is so like him, but her hair curls in the heat and the water and shines a little red in the light, and her happiness is mine, for her father's, for the most part, is more guarded with logic._

_"I swear, you're almost human when you hold her," I say to Spock, hardly hiding the amusement from my voice. As always, my fondness for him spills through my words. He raises an eyebrow but I know him too well:_

_"Only myself, and I am half human," he replies, placing little T'Sei on the ground quite seriously. She looks back up at him for a moment, then at me, smiling._

_"Only myself, and complete," he says, so close I can see the sun reflected in his eyes, and beneath, far galaxies, distant universes in a song of balance and happiness I can barely begin to comprehend, before his fingers touch mine and his thoughts become clear to me, how inseparable they are from mine._

God damn it all, but this was a dream. The sun filtered through her eyes before Saavik saw she was alone except for her baby; Spock was nowhere to be seen, though she thought she'd felt his presence earlier that night, but maybe he'd just been in the same house. It was his parents', after all. Anguished wracked her frame, though the infant girl slept onwards obliviously.

"I think I'll call her T'Sei," she said to herself quietly, and cried.

—

Spock's head was bent in thought, in his father's rooms. Sarek was at Earth, so was absent, and it was the only place Spock could go to think, to be separate enough to think. All his thoughts were filled with hazy, half-formed memories of a far, strange green place, seen from a much lower angle and a much younger age. He shouldn't have been able to remember, he thought, but he knew.

He knew what Saavik had done, why he was alive, why this was happening.

He didn't know what he felt, what he thought, for his thoughts had been…different ever since Genesis, almost as if they weren't his own, but more confused, more…emotional. Sometimes he forgot himself entirely. This awareness had washed through him so strongly upon seeing Saavik again that he barely saw. Some inner part of his mind told him he had missed something, that something important had happened, but he did not know what he felt and so could not understand what he thought: guilt, or that strange emotion Vulcans could never describe or feel in quite the same way, love? He was unfamiliar to himself. Lost in incomprehensible thoughts, he was startled to find his mother in the doorway, though he didn't react as so; some Vulcanness was left to him, at least.

"I thought I'd find you here," Amanda said, her gaze softening but her voice hardening. "Would you mind telling me what the hell you're thinking?" Spock blinked then looked at her, really saw her: his mother had aged in the past few days, her hair whiter than he remembered, though he'd last seen her months, maybe years before.

"I'm sorry," she said suddenly, and to Spock's slight shock—his Vulcan half reacting—began to cry. "I thought you were dead." And her arms went around him. The part of his mind still on that green, now-destroyed planet, Genesis, reflected without as many words that he missed his mother. It stunned him into even deeper silence. "But you've got more than that to be sorry for," she said quietly, and left before Spock could puzzle out the meaning of her words and moreover, his own mind.

`.

Spock steepled his fingers as Saavik came through the door. She had stood outside it until the lights automatically dimmed, her head bent, thought running through her mind. T'Sei was sleeping, Amanda near her with watchful, concerned eyes should the newborn half-Vulcan wake. At last, at the end of evening, Saavik took a breath and decided to face him. Before, images vivid as sunrise and bloodstains bloomed across her mind, images and memories: when she saw his face, it was momentarily overlaid with one younger, more passionate; she almost reeled backwards from the shock.

"Spock," she began. Though the other face still shadowed his own, in her mind, he gave no sign of being affected—until Saavik saw his eyes. There was confusion there, but also a spark of curiosity and…something else.

If he had known less, he would have said, "Saavik, I do not remember you having a child. Whom did you choose as a mate, and at what time in my absence?" But Spock's mind now held strange dimensions, an…openness that defied logic. It was like a vast unknown area filled with stars, this newfound ability to think in ways he thought he'd forgotten. Through it echoed almost synaptically connected images, ones he was barely aware of, and some yet to surface: Saavik's child was young, and…

_He felt an inexplicable connection to her, the strength of it almost overwhelming. At first he had thought it was a tentative reaching-outward of his mind to his mother, so much instinctual trust he felt…as he had stepped forward, to see that it was her lying down not from exhaustion but something else, the swift darkness and light across his eyelids spanned the sunrise and sunset of a different world. He had blinked, but the feeling stayed with him. A part of Spock thought he was still shaky and uncertain of past and present after the fal tor pan, but his thoughts now grew together, like trees or distant stars: they gathered the weight of understanding._

Spock, momentarily lost in the light across Saavik's face, came back into visual awareness powerfully.

"Live long and prosper," she said. Her hand was splayed upwards in the Vulcan salute, her voice almost quiet, her eyes meeting his, an unfathomable connection beneath. It almost took him aback: she _knew_. The bond, the thoughts, were unshaking. If he closed his eyes, he could feel her two fingers against his, her mind guiding his own.

"Saavik…I am sorry," Spock began. It was strange, so strange to Saavik to hear his voice after seeing his words only in his eyes, his fear, his euphoria written across his changing face. It was like coming home, but only then realizing that home was where you left. The words could not begin to change, to heal the almost unendurable upheaval of his death, his rebirth, his obliviousness…

She could feel the question in his voice, and moved forward to press her fingers into the position of a mind meld. His closed eyes were familiar to her as breath, but she found they signaled deep thought, a halt.

"I did not wish to reveal memories that I thought at first might indeed not be memories. I knew, with a strange certainty, that they were not dreams. They had unfolded, existed before the eventual patterns and thoughts came back…it is like time and space combined, thoughts without words…but through it all, I saw your face. When I remembered, past everything else, you had left…"

He had learned to balance the wordless thoughts, the strange pattern of almost-emotions and images…the recognition…with other thoughts, instinct guiding all his memories. There was not turmoil in his mind except when he did not recognize what he was leaving behind…the instincts that seemed almost all he could rely on, when other, structured, simple recognition came back, guided him to Vulcan again. The stars had seemed restless, his perception of them, until he did so.

The light and shadow, the half-memories, the overpowering instinct of another time, the feeling of a person instead of words and names…this trust, this deep feeling, almost overpowered him. In little flickers of remembered darkness, he saw not a bedroom, not Saavik asleep…hurt?…but felt, cold and real, the floor of a cave beneath him, and arms around him. The sun of Vulcan became a swifter-setting sun, one in a different sky, that cast light on faces both alike and different to ones he had seen before…after a sleepless night of almost inexplicable thought that was scattered and connected as a growing child's, the reality of Saavik standing before him made him know. Some small, powerfully connected part of himself linked everything together, connected with his katra, showed him a different time in the light of further knowledge.

"Months ago, I had not begun to understand the shifting between my katra and something deeper, something that seemed older and yet younger…

_I remember_."

And then they fell into each others' minds, into images underneath word-pattern thoughts, and beneath that was someone just born and very old, very recently understood.

"Spock," Saavik spoke. "You have another katra…" Green and brown and blue and a bright sunrise faded, and Spock realized he saw her face. A faint light slanted across her fingers held a slight width apart from his own face.

He nodded. "It merged so thoroughly with what I had already wished, already almost realized, that I did not realize its difference until I saw your face at Gol." He bowed his head, feeling still the warmth of her fingertips that brushed gently away. "I did not…do not wish for it to be gone, even before I realized. This katra, this…this…it is like a newborn child," Spock said, "and yet ancient in the truth it has." He thought of the infant whose existence he had learned of moments before.

_What truth_, Saavik's eyes asked. She felt the moment expanding, the life in it brought intensely to her awareness as his fingers and his voice. There had been many moments almost like this, but none so complete.

The little heartbeat, the other and yet same self within him, replied, with and without words, _Parted and never parted. Never and always touching and touched…_

He had loved her before everything, that bond inexplicable while he had first remained alive, causing him to reject other lovers, to move far beyond to try and understand it. It had strengthened on Genesis and come back to merge almost stronger than before. He had realized he could always faintly feel her thoughts, as if they were his own…he had realized just how much she had kept him alive. Many times.

As the sun set, their combined thoughts saw the setting sun as not of Genesis or of Vulcan, but a sun rising in another moment, in their touching fingers, in their touching minds.

.'

A deep, waterlike sound rolled across the plain of Gol with the sun's rise. The plain was not empty as usual; figures stood there, touched upon by clear fingers of the dawn's light. Distant, Mount Seleya seemed to come out of an ancient silence, as night moved majestically into morning. Saavik caught her breath. High above, with wings tinged gold in a sudden flash, a _shavokh_ wheeled. The sweeping shadow of the bird of prey moved farther and exposed a different and multicolored glint in the sky: above the _shavokh_ was a sundweller. Its wings caught and refracted the light as it soared above for a long moment and then it was gone. Saavik felt her heart rise with it and with the rising sun. She felt the line of light brightening as if it were within her, causing her to smile ever so slightly.

_With the sun's rise..._

Spock had not reached her yet, nor had she walked all the way to Seleya. They had chosen to cross part of the desert before the _kal-i-farr_; it was little distance compared to the vastness of stars, of Hellguard, and of life and death, but Spock and Saavik both had thought it symbolic of their union: alone and then together, parting and never parting...

It seemed no time at all to cross the desert. Saavik was accustomed to it, though her thoughts would return to ferns and rain. For a while, her thoughts expanded into the red dust, the aimless, sharp skies, the mountains growing nearer and the point of sky that seemed alight where the sundweller had been moments before. And then the mountain rapidly rose, dark and lit gloriously, in her vision. The bridge across it was a line of fire, welcome in her sight, interrupted by the sunlit figures that crossed it. The air was empty and heavy at once, lightening with each moment. As she neared, she could make out the face of Spock, his features unreadable to most except for those who stood there, many known and one unknown. She thought they held a strange lightness and tension, however, the same that she felt…

And then she stood at the place of the _kal-i-farr_. She had only ever seen it from a distance, and once, falling through the memories in Spock's mind, and yet, somehow, it seemed familiar. She saw dark eyes that were not Spock's—T'Pau—an inclined her head. Spock drew nearer and Saavik to him until his face took up nearly all of her vision. Behind it, the sky still lightened in a portentious, exhilarated flame, as their hands were moved to each other's faces and then joined…

In an instant, she was unaware of T'Pau's words. She was falling in a headlong rush of darkness, silence, and thoughts, into Spock's past and wrapped in her own, behind which shone the sun free of the horizon. A dark-haired boy cried out in the cold and rushed into the gaze of another boy whose gaze rested beyond the walls, the words that held him on Vulcan, his father's presence behind him…a boy who became a man…gray and dark and light, Starfleet and planets and dizzying stars, pressed into her vision, flowed past her. There were little currents and anchors of thought, around different people…a smiling woman, surrounded by plants, her eyes kind—Amanda—a man in later years, mingled with memories of stars and strange things…and here the current stilled, became more heartfelt: someone smaller, hidden by shadows. Saavik approached, saw first eyes like sparks of light and then dizzily beheld the child step into the light that revealed features smaller and identical to her own…the light hinted at a knife in her grasp and then dropped and memories became galaxies and then darkness. Behind all was their two heartbeats, saying more than words, perhaps a language she had known far before she recalled.

The sun blinked past her vision and expanded into reality, though the current of thoughts strengthened like its own heartbeat behind her sight. She could see Spock, the expression in his eyes no longer unreadable. Beyond him was T'Pau, and the man she had not seen before and yet faintly recognized.

_Parted and never parted_ registered through her mind, swept away and cleared, defined all thoughts, but behind it, the recognition expanded and sharpened as Saavik realized.

In his features, not so hidden, was the exultation of the rising sun, yet sharp and fierce as a _shavokh_. It was clear in something around his eyes, the tightness there and the expression withheld but permeating his face. _You are not Vulcan, are you_, she thought of the stranger. His smile hinted at it, and yet there was something else.

She had fallen away from the mind meld contact with Spock and yet a memory still gripped her sight, shadowing it with the curious dark of space broken by a single planet known only in her early memories and then two planets, perhaps, from before…

She caught the stranger's gaze only for an instant before Spock's paired fingers met her own. The feeling remained, however, powerful in that instant, that this man would be seen sometime in their future.

However portentous, the thought was swept away by the stilling sky and the consciousness of Spock, now fully joined to hers. She smiled, half-memories clearing away with a fierce exultation; in their minds, together, two children lost were lost no longer, and in both, wondering consciousness like the vastness of space took on the curious glow of the stars.


	3. Part III: Starfleet

T'Sei wandered the halls alone, steps that might have been silenced had she been on Vulcan ringing loud and angered. The long muscles in her arms, courtesy of her _kahs-wan_ training, months in the burning, molten-hot desert of Vulcan, tightened in spasms as she clenched her fists. She bit her lip, looked down and then up, but the anger stayed like a sun inside of her, choking through her every movement. The hallway seemed to pass like a blur, the Starfleet insignia becoming a rush of blue akin to wind. T'Sei tried to fall through the feeling, imagine it was a past and a different place, not her own, where a darkening indigo expanse filled with stars sucked away the pain of another's past as that other, that predecessor, in the same anger, wished wildly and furiously to leave the place of her mixed, painful birth…She fell back into her own awareness, heart pounding wildly. The first time the memories had come upon her, the ones not her own, she had been eating a ways apart from the other Starfleet cadets and all of it fell into blackness and feelings stronger than she thought existed in Vulcans. T'Sei knew Vulcans were a people of deep emotions…after all, she was half-Vulcan, as were both her parents, and had felt within their actions and their weighted glances between each other the scorch and fire of emotion not quite hidden…but this was so strange, so new. So strange to encounter in someone not her own self.

And the stranger thing was that this person…this mind, whoever had given her these memories, seemed so _similar_ to herself. The thought patterns, the reactions, were just a little more restrained, but almost slipped into the grain of T'Sei's own memories…

_It's as if we are not two separate people, but very, very much the same._

And that was the danger of it. And so T'Sei held the memories separate from her own with as much force as possible. But she had not been trained on Mount Seleya and had learned very little of the disciplines of the mind in the calm whirlwind of her childhood; she feared, a little, that she could not continue to do so for long.

She brushed a strand of dark, curly hair out of her face, hand still shuddering a little. Perhaps it wasn't just the strange fear that pervaded her thoughts in the sometimes-dark, sometimes-dream-filled nights. Everything around her seemed alien, strange. It hadn't lost all of the strangeness that it possessed when she came here.

She blinked as a yellow-white light outlining a door expanded as the door opened, a silhouette shadowed by the light that bounced irritatingly across the single strand of hair she had failed to brush away.

Lieutenant Stevens stammered a little, met by what seemed to be an angry Romulan stare. Vulcan calm was only hinted at by the restraint in T'Sei's actions, that she didn't immediately attack him with whatever martial arts they had on Vulcan.

"They've started the test, T'Sei," he said nervously, backing away a little. He wondered why her glare seemed suddenly unfocused, then in an almost unreal feeling, careened forward to stop her from hitting the ground. The Vulcan…human…Romulan…whatever she was, had collapsed. Lieutenant Stevens swallowed, sweated, pulled at his collar, wondered why it had to be him walking in on this nightmare and missing the Kobiyashi Maru.

_She was running, running past a sky of stars overhead, ones she felt and knew were there, knew the position of but which she could not look up at, for fear beat tight at her back…why was the ground so low, the sky so large? There, looming ahead, were buildings. Her heartbeat clenched around her entire body and her muscles screamed flight, not encounter. Every part of her wished to veer away from what she rapidly approached, but ahead…ahead were the lights. A small part of her screamed for an endless moment and cast the shape of the windows into a shape that meant fear, for truly, she had known no else. _

_She felt the forward momentum, felt the desperate leap as she nearly entered the doorway stopped violently by hard hands jerking her backwards, pulling her away sharply as she leaned forward to break free, to run…run away! Sonabastards trying to…she should run…In rigid fear, she searched for her knife, clawed at her dirty garments then looked up wildly as her hands met nothing. The lights, reflected in his eyes, menacing, clawed into her eyes and she bared her teeth against the way they stabbed, closed her ears against his laughter, tensed to push free again then saw what was in the doorway. She was screaming. She screamed, the lights receding or growing brighter…_

She fell forward into brightness, realizing she heard her own voice then looking up to see other eyes. The room focused into the bright calm of sickbay as her breath grew more even and she realized hands restrained her from attacking the doctor who held a tricorder over her. Fear still beat within her and her eyes remained wide. She rubbed a hand over her face and struggled to slow her heartbeat. But meditation had never come easily to her, only sleep, and with it, dreams. Recently, dreams she ran from.

"T'Sei?"

She looked into the doctor's face, closed her eyes a moment, and then strode out of sickbay. The passing Starfleet cadets were too absorbed in their own affairs to notice the tightness of the face of the Vulcan-not-Vulcan and how deathly pale she had become. The tumult of whispers from sickbay were only background noise in the rush of foot traffic.

"She only just recovered from whatever that was, and now—"

"—walked right out of there. Not in a state for—"

"Amazing student. I have no idea what—"

"—her face! She looks so much like—"

"—back on Vulcan—"

She felt years, galaxies away from her parents. And away from her past. A longing this soul-posessive had not come over her since she sat at the window on the first day of Starfleet Academy and stared at the stars. Something was deeply wrong. It seemed like it was erasing herself, that she was left on a ledge that was even now falling away. A Vulcan studying it, perhaps, would think that behind this deep feeling and this strange surfacing of other memories lay a truth momentous and worth studying. T'Sei wanted only to run from it, for if she slipped deeper into it, she would lose herself or become a self she never wished to be. And she was not Vulcan, only half. Yet even that made no sense anymore. In a moment of deep study, she wondered, _Am I not what has made me? Or are the basic elements of self something further than that? Something more, something less, something yet to be found?_ She thought of a planet now gone, and her mind cleared into her own thoughts, her own beginnings.

It was a strange thing, knowledge, one she embraced for its own self, not because of who she was. It seemed to urge her to new change, new discovery. She did not completely know herself, yet so sure she was of herself when she had looked up into the sky at Vulcan and thought, _I am not at home, and yet I am. _

So absorbed in her own thoughts was she that only a blur was the passing cadet she had befriended, and his puzzled smile and unreturned greetings blurred past as well. Noticing and yet not her discomposure, recognizing it as something part of her as her name, her self were and yet as something unfamiliar, he thought instead of the Kobiyashi Maru, not sunlight on the hair of a woman unlike any he had ever seen, or the way her sudden grin had seemed right and one with her behavior despite her moments of Vulcan composure.

"Mother, what is that?" she had asked when she was simply younger, pointing a small finger at the blackness of space where once, she knew, there must have been a star or a planet. Saavik had looked down, many thoughts of what to say racing through her head, but saying simply, "That is where Genesis used to be." A strange mixture of words and impressions had followed and gradually slipped into memory, surfacing occasionally as clear as when they were spoken and making T'Sei blurt as she saw a blond youth, almost familiar, as one of the cadets, "David?"

"Andy Naren", he'd responded, confused, after automatically shaking his head in confusion. Of course he hadn't known what she'd meant. He hadn't completely expected so see so many people who weren't human, but he felt oddly comfortable and at edge with this young woman who just then grinned at him after the lost expression that had come over her features. The shock of T'Sei's expressing of emotions took a while to ease among the cadets and other personnel at Starfleet. She remembered, at her second class—the first, she had walked happily in unrecognized and uncommented upon—the man instructing them had looked sharply at her as if looking for someone else. "T'Sei…yes, you have no last name, of course, so daughter of…"—he'd looked up—"Spock and Saavik of Vulcan?"—then shook his head as if he knew something she never would. He and others were confused when she acted like either of her parents or anything unlike the automatic 'Vulcan' they assumed she would be when they saw her pointed ears and her eyebrows. Some felt more at ease that she expressed emotions, and then uncomfortable again. She gradually took no notice and eagerly pursued her studies with a passion neither strictly Vulcan, Romulan, or human.

And so it was that as she passed Andew Naren only realizing it at the end, she knew she could not tell him of these circumstances and of the knowledge that arose in her blood and her mind. She did not need to remember the communication she had overheard that said her father was missing and reported to be in Romulan space. She did not need to remember the linguistics and the culture comparisons she had seemingly inexplicably decided to take before her graduation from the Academy. She did not think of the blazing stars and the blazing spaces between them, or of the moments of realization her classmates perhaps did not understand. She went down the hallway at a run, heart elevating in recognition and mind silent in approval. She knew the codes for the ships. She could pretend she was on a training mission, and then…

It had been a while since T'Sei had first noticed that her life was quickening, becoming harder and easier to understand. Something, something she could barely recognize pushed her onward now. A day before, she had bolted awake as her roommate entered her living space. T'Sei had seen a different face, a different time, before she realized the impetus of her circumstances, the necessity…

…to discover the truth behind her confused, strangely vivid half-memories not her own.


	4. Part IV: ShiKahr

It was easy enough to pass the guard to the small training ships unnoticed; if a guard had been there, she would have looked past them with almost Vulcan calm and found an excuse within regulations for maintenance of one of the ships, or for medical leave on Vulcan. The hangar was quiet and empty, however, and unendingly the cool deep blue of near-space. T'Sei slipped easier still into the shadows at the corner of one of the larger ships that had a thin film of dust from unuse. She bent and reached out a hand—which met with nothing. Her searching grew a little frantic until her hand met curving metal. T'Sei located the window-door latch of her tiny, borrowed Vulcan vessel and pried upwards, then maneuvered herself in. Her heart stilled in her side for a moment as the codes she keyed rapidly in to open the great doors met with no movement…but there, the doors were opening, solid black revealing black dotted with stars. Though she was still, she felt she was running…T'Sei slipped out of the space doors and into the vast dark ocean ahead. There. Her pulse was slowing, the fever haze blurring her vision receding as recognition moved through her.

Some lingering unease or excitement prompted her to stay on manual instead of setting a course for her destination, after her brief stare at the vastness of space. She eventually breathed more calmly and her path straightened as she grew more familiar with the vessel she'd grown unaccustomed to since her single childhood flight on Vulcan. She slipped farther and farther. Eventually the darkness all seemed one and the same, though at first she made out marked differences in her memory between individual stars and systems. She thought of logic, and of life where there was none. It seemed her father's voice was telling her something; T'Sei could not shake herself out of the growing exhaustion she had kept at bay for longer than even the Vulcan norm. She had ceased in her observation of positioning and course; the stars were all the same…

She woke on Vulcan.

There was red all around her, desert, and beyond, buildings curved in a familiar way. Vulcan. She reassured herself she was not at her parents' home or in any too-recognizable outpost, then nearly laughed at the fact that she was hiding in plain sight, in one of the many landing sites outside of ShiKahr. If any passing Vulcan heard her laugh from inside the tiny vessel, they gave no notice in their passive expressions.

Technically, she was assumed to be at the Academy. This was the last place anyone would look. But she wasn't concerned as much with people as with events…some unexplained doubt and unease still remained, something she knew she would have to face when she arrived where the inexplicable could be explained.

She was not completely sure where she would go first; only that all her study had met with few facts and a greater amount of mysterious unknowns to all she wished could be answered. Then again, she was presumably unique and completely alone in her situation…

"A problematic situation for citizens of both worlds. They were forced to choose one and abandon another. Perhaps it is wise they chose the less hostile of the two; I sure as hell wouldn't want to live on a Romulus. "

T'Sei started. It had been T'Sei's first encounter with the strength of human opinion. She knew it was used often to get a class to respond, to debate, to react as how they would react on a starship, faced with different situations.

"There weren't many such instances on actual Romulus. Such experimentations and sundering, being cataclysmic and honestly a drain of the Empire's resources, happen rarely, besides that they despise their mistakes and the sharing of Romulan blood…"

They did not raise hands in that class, or in any classes in the Academy, for that matter. Answering in Starfleet required display of intent, and perhaps her teacher had been unsettled by the intent burning in those eyes as the half-Vulcan leaned slightly forward to speak.

"Though Starfleet does not always use the data, for purposes of general information and coherence and perhaps the problems it poses, that is incorrect.

"Yes, there were." _And the ones who started it were murderers_…She had whirled from class to class that day, and her more reserved, instinctual thoughts were coming loose. But the vehemence of that one took her so by surprise that she stopped talking. Gehnal looked at her quickly and Anderson, pausing in her furiously fast note-taking, had a vague look of bemusement on her face.

Admiral Tholav raised an eyebrow in an uncannily Vulcan-like fashion. "Really, Cadet? Would you care to explain how you and not Starfleet are so aware of this? As many Vulcans have been known to say, such a statement must be based on fact." His look was not a challenge, but…

T'Sei felt suddenly blank and uncomfortably lightweight, the hidden knowledge and whatever had triggered the bitter instinctual response gone.

"I…just know…"

Many things were inexplicable. This was not one of them, but she could not shake it out of her head. Something in her beginning or beyond it gripped her and would not let her rest until it was answered.

She still felt a little lightheaded, but quick, analytical thought swept it out of her mind. She was on Vulcan. How she had gotten here without clear memory of it or a direct course, she did not know, but she must move onward. She bent downwards to assure herself that the landing supports of the tiny ship were still intact, then straightened. She should change out of her Starfleet uniform; it was too noticeable. For now, she reached into a storage compartment, obtained a nondescript cloak void of design and folded it around her shoulders. She would think about her hair later. Logically, Vulcans did not always notice the unusual when it did not affect them. Pausing and thinking, only half-seeing the sun-haze of desert beyond ShiKahr, she reflected that perhaps it wasn't as much an absent accident as she'd thought. Vulcan seemed…_right._

Her steps took her through a crowded market in the middle of the city and clear through to the other side. She kept her face carefully blank, struggling with Vulcan impassiveness, as she passed many being more inherently logical. Out of the sea of people, she was overtaken by relief and dared move her face a little, smile and grimace for the sake of it. _God, staying like that would be terrible._ She was glad that that particular Vulcan way was not hers—

She stopped as she saw the midday sun's red glint off the side of a familiar building and realized her intentions. Inwardly, she cursed, then with more thought and deliberation realized this may not be a hindrance. She could find some way to skirt around that particular house and only be there briefly. She couldn't pass as a visitor; the thought was ludicrous. The particular inhabitants would recognize her surely as their own faces.

Perhaps there was a reason, though, she had come back home, though unannounced and only briefly. Beyond that she needed a change of clothing, something pulled her here…

The sun was just beginning to set, imbuing the walls with a quiet fire and lighting upon the eyes of a stranger a little ways away from the house. T'Sei walked like she should be there, though the hood of her cloak shielded her face. She would be immediately mistrusted if her intentions seemed less than upfront, if her confidence wavered. In that thought, she strode towards the entrance of her parents' house, unwilling to let the quiet memories of it calm her. The very place had a reassuring effect on her mind, though being there put her slightly offbalance when she remembered she was older than the obstinate, curly-haired girl who had felt the unanswered questions in her blood and left Vulcan for Earth and Starfleet. So unsettled was T'Sei by her reappearance in the home she had left that she forgot to veer off last-minute from the gates at the front of the house and head towards who she had seen in the back looking out at the desert—someone whose ancestry, if not complete identity, she had recognized instantly. He had the same longing for this place that she had—the kind that an individual foreign and yet not completely to a place could have for it, the kind of longing that realized that it was never completely their home. Too late, she realized she was in the main passageway. Inwardly reprimanding herself, T'Sei thought rapidly of other ways to keep hidden.

_In plain sight._

Her footsteps took her to a room with a long table where many were seated. She dared not turn her head; she sensed the presence of the speaker. T'Sei headed for one of the seeming-wooden chairs in the back of the room and, noticing the other Vulcans, pulled the hood of her cloak down. From the shadows, her heart beat hard as she hoped and did not hope to be seen by the woman speaking at the front of the room.

It was a sort of Vulcan conference, but unlike the ones on Earth; the collected men and women in this room were bound together loosely by the pursuit and interest in knowledge, with no other motives. Vulcans were naturally curious and inquisitive, and had such meetings and discussions in the auditoriums of the Vulcan Science Academy and in their own dwellings. Place mattered not, though when T'Sei's ears began to register the sound of the speaker's resonant voice as words, she realized that perhaps this meeting held more discretion than usual.

To a Vulcan without knowledge otherwise, the woman speaking was Vulcan. An unusual Vulcan in perhaps, for her appearance was striking. She had large, liquid eyes above high cheekbones and a wide, full mouth. Her dark hair somehow was restrained from escaping in every direction, and unlike a usual Vulcan's, it curled. Slight signs of age were beginning to show in her face, which held careful Vulcan calm as she spoke of something very few Vulcans had actively supported before: the reunification of Vulcan and Romulus. She skirted any acknowledgement of her own support or disapproval of such a measure, and spoke rather of someone missing.

"His proposals to the Vulcan Science Academy were rejected many times, and upon returning here during my leave from Starfleet, I could not ascertain his whereabouts and discovered that he had last been seen under his own identity near the Neutral Zone with Romulus."

T'Sei could not suppress a sharp intake of air as she realized that this man was Spock, her father. So he _had_ gone to Romulus! But why? The sound was hardly audible but the woman, still speaking, must have heard it; she was deeply attuned to sudden changes in the minds of those she knew. Perhaps T'Sei should not have been surprised that a matter concerning both the Romulans and the Vulcans was being spoken of by this particular individual. Besides the relevance of her personal involvement with the missing Spock, she was half-Vulcan, half-Romulan. This woman's eyes met T'Sei; to T'Sei, it was nearly like looking at herself. She kept her face as blank as possible, desperately glad that Spock was not here as well.

Her mother, Saavik of Vulcan, still speaking, raised an eyebrow.

_Isn't she supposed to be at Starfleet Academy?_ Saavik wondered.

_Since she is here, evidently that matters not._

Saavik could not be entirely sure that her daughter had been there, for when she looked next in that direction, after answering a particularly scientific question concerning the shared origins of Vulcans and Romulans, the cloaked figure was gone. Saavik still felt a slight presence, however, at the edge of her mind; her mental bond with her daughter, that strengthened and cleared when they were close in distance.

_Not gone far._

She could not think of why her daughter would require a return to Vulcan at such a time. T'Sei's will for secrecy, however, made Saavik assume that there was a reason for such a matter and that it would be best if she did not disturb it. Only a faint concern remained in her mind, and would not be dispelled until Saavik understood what was going on.

T'Sei breathed more easily now, outside of the room where her mother spoke. A great part of her did not wish to run into anyone she knew, and she had. Perhaps it was because her mother was so perceptive, she would understand what T'Sei was doing before she herself knew and try to persuade her to gain knowledge in safety. Knowing her mother, she would likely succeed. But something more drastic than research had to be done.

The sun was setting now; it sat, burning red, just above the horizon of the desert. T'Sei watched it for a long moment, thinking wordless thoughts, then realized she was being watched. The stranger she had seen before entering she could see more clearly. He was looking at her. He, too, appeared Vulcan, with the same upswept eyebrows and pointed ears, and his planed features were a balance between aesthetically pleasing and sharp. His face was overall more pointed, sharper, and had once been harder than a Vulcan's. He was perhaps a few decades older than herself, certainly younger than her father.

He was not a Vulcan; his face showed entirely too much puzzlement. T'Sei inwardly grinned fiercely; his was a welcome change from the studious faces of the Vulcans inside. Her eyebrows rose at his speech.

"I thought the conference would continue long after sundown," he began, then he blinked, looking harder at her. "_Akhh_! You are not Saavik."

His words were accented strangely and less measured than any Vulcan's. T'Sei's expression settled as he spoke, but she raised an eyebrow now.

"I am T'Sei. Her daughter."

He nodded, suppressing a smile that twitched at the corner of his mouth. Clearly he was unused to masking his expressions.

"And _you_," she continued, "are a Romulan." It wasn't a guess, not quite. It fit so well. But how had he gotten here?

_In the same way you're going to get there._

He looked vaguely surprised, then amused. "Is it that obvious?"

"I'm sure you'll blend in with time," T'Sei assured him. He was clearly at ease, concentrating only on the astuteness of what he assumed was Vulcan observation. T'Sei's breath hitched for a microsecond as she contemplated what she was about to do and thought about her training, Starfleet and non-Starfleet. He did not notice. In an instant, she gripped both his hands behind his back and had her knife pressed to his throat. The Romulan's eyes widened. Clearly he was off guard since his arrival on Vulcan, which had to be recently. Logically…

"Have you transport?" T'Sei asked the overpowered Romulan, grinning. "I'm of a mind to go to Romulus."

She removed the knife as he started walking towards the edge of the desert where she could already spy the metal glint of a ship. Of course he had transport. He couldn't quite shrug out of her grip or force it apart…

When they reached the ship and she released her hands, she was surprised to see that he was grinning. "Her daughter? I can see the resemblance."

T'Sei was struck with a sudden desire to know what her mother had done that was so decidedly non-Vulcan and so memorable. Perhaps she would ask when she returned. _If_ she returned, a small, ominous corner of her mind warned as she climbed into the side seat of the Romulan ship that was barely bigger than a shuttle. It must have been a smaller ship that was inside whatever came over to Vulcan, something that had a hard time doing so, as was evident from the scrapes and charred markings that had glanced across the surface. A shadow across the doorway signified the Romulan man's entrance. T'Sei was startled when she noticed he had suddenly grown serious, his expression grave.

"It's a little late for introductions," he said, "but this is necessary to know. It's going to be no easy thing, getting past Romulan security.

"I am Ruanek—" he paused—"—a Romulan, yes, but that isn't going to help us. I left the Romulan empire to save your father's life."

His eyes held warning.

"They consider me a defector, and by law, if I set foot on Romulus, it could be punishable by death. Very easily so, in fact."

The unspoken continuation of that thought did not need to be spoken, but hung in the air between them: _to say nothing of what the Romulans would consider an outsider on their planet without permission. Or what they would do, how much more easily your death would come._


	5. Part V: Leaving Federation Space

The orbit of a planet never ceased to amaze her, now that she could see it more clearly and not through a haze of anger and confusion. T'Sei had rarely seen Vulcan from the vantage point of near space; she had been looking ahead when she went from Vulcan to Starfleet years before. Now, she turned her head around to see the receding fiery globe of her home planet, as Ruanek guided the ship towards a planet that was far different but in ways the same. The atmosphere burned thin, a minute band of ultramarine curving around the far more vast red-brown planet. It seemed to turn as their small Romulan ship did, then gradually pull away almost as if reluctantly, until Vulcan was only a speck and then lost in the brilliance of its star.

Stars flowed past in her thoughts. T'Sei tried not to remember that she had, in her childhood, pressed against the window of a starship, the only time she had been on one before she decided to join Starfleet…she could barely recall all of that short trip, only that somehow its outcome had not been favorable and now the déjà vu that enveloped her when she stared, transfixed, was tinged with some violent emotion. Smoothly she turned to the controls, only to stare at them, perplexed at their order and placement. She shook her head as if to clear it of the automatic Starfleet-training knowledge of other ships' controls and saw peripherally that Ruanek was looking at her strangely.

"What?" She asked.

He shook his head. "Maybe I should help you with those so you don't accidentally press the wrong button. From what I've seen of them, the controls on Federation ships are quite different."

T'Sei nodded assent.

Most of what she'd guessed was right; Romulan ships were similar to Vulcan ones, but with just enough difference to put her on edge and make her uneasy. She kept expecting to be able to turn around and see that the ship's hull wasn't so slanting or close to her shoulder, that she could blink and the occasional writing would be in Vulcan and understandable. She had a slight familiar knowledge already of what to do, based on Vulcan ships. However, some of the things she grasped instinctually startled her. With a few words from Ruanek, she was sure that lever and those buttons would change the speed of the ship, but she surprised him by, with full knowledge already of the similar controls, she stopped the ship at a dead halt.

T'Sei raised an eyebrow. Stars blinked around at them from the windows. Ruanek was vaguely green and seemed like he wanted to swear in Romulan. She pressed a combination of buttons and moved another lever control, and they were moving forward once again.

"_Don't_ do that—" Ruanek began, glaring, nervous, hand instinctively where his honor blade would have been if he had still had it on his person. Which he didn't. The rest of his words passed in a garbled Romulan-accented blur to T'Sei as she gripped the back of her seat and turned slightly, looking at the stars and more than slightly unsettled.

"Ruanek, I shouldn't have been _able_ to do that," she said tensely.

If he had any thoughts about that or opinions as to why, he kept them to himself, looking straight ahead and piloting with the ease of someone who had flown a larger ship, perhaps not a starship but close, in more drastic situations than this seemed to be. T'Sei assumed that a large part of his mind could concentrate on other things and decided she didn't really want to know what he was thinking about. It didn't seem pleasant, although as far as she could tell, his face staring straight ahead had a thoughtful expression.

Ruanek didn't know very much about Vulcans. He had been on Vulcan for less than one of their weeks, and now he was gone from there again. They made use of logic and hid their emotions, except when they were extremely disturbed. Perhaps Spock had not been a good example of how Vulcans acted; he had been in the throes of one of those strange biological conditions Vulcans had as consequence to their outward emotionlessness. He was slightly confused around this Vulcan—who, he realized, must be part Romulan, from what little he knew of her ancestry. It was not that she didn't act as the vast majority of Vulcans did; her actions and reactions seemed more familiar to him than theirs, made more sense. She didn't act Romulan, however; she was far from that. Instead, she seemed to behave in a bewildering, indiscernible mixture of proto-Romulan, Vulcan, and perhaps human manner…what he really understood in her behavior, however, was _confusion_. He was no Vulcan to read another's mind, but T'Sei reminded him enough of himself that he automatically thought not of what she was doing but what might lie under it. Something was wrong. T'Sei's actions had strength and deliberation in them, but sometimes afterwards she would blink and an odd expression would come over her face, as if she didn't know why she'd done what she did. Frankly, it scared Ruanek a little. He was Romulan, yes, and capable of dealing with most understandable problems he had experience with. But that didn't mean he wasn't wondering what the hell was going through T'Sei's mind.

Perhaps there was some sort of way she could be healed, he thought. He remembered that Spock had returned to sanity and seemed to have nearly forgotten—and been embarrassed by—his rash behavior near the end of his help with overthrowing the Praetor Romulus had previously had.

_Although 'rash' perhaps is a little euphemistic when describing someone who struck out at any other male, perceiving them as enemies, and could barely navigate his way back to Vulcan._

Ruanek had been a little shaken to know that Vulcan calm could be overcome so easily. Spock was better now, but…

Ruanek inwardly shook his head: Spock's had recovered after returning to Vulcan and to his wife; it had had something to do with that. Ruanek was not entirely sure, but he tentatively assumed that whatever was disturbing T'Sei was something of a different nature. She had _been_ on Vulcan and acted this way. Plus, she hadn't tried to attack any of the females there, and no rage burned in her eyes. She was sane. At least, as far as he could tell. It wasn't that. And so while he was relieved that she likely wouldn't try to throttle him anytime soon, he remained apprehensive and uncertain and just slightly concerned for their lives. He also knew, on some basic level that went past guesswork or knowledge, that whatever was the problem could not be solved on Vulcan, and perhaps not in any other way than T'Sei was using now, for T'Sei seemed to be anticipating, if not knowledge and understanding, then some great change or justice that otherwise likely would never happen.

Ruanek sat up straighter and concentrated on piloting. He had briefly gone out of warp, but that was not what distracted him.

It was dim in the ship, but the light didn't change with the time of any system's day; it remained the same—starlight—which had made Ruanek lose track of time a couple occasions before. He guessed it had been approximately two Vulcan days when he started tiring and drifting off and the words on the controls blurred a little before him. T'Sei seemed outwardly recovered, and he showed her the sector they were heading for, then let blackness envelop him.

.`

He awoke alert, wondering for a moment why he was in his smaller scoutcraft instead of the larger ship it came in, why he was heading _towards_ Romulan space, as if he had come from somewhere else, then the objects around him became defined instead of various shades of gray metal and green reflections and his mind grew easier. A particular patch of green he had been staring at drew sharply into focus as he awoke fully: one of the navigation screens showing different planetary systems cast a greenish glow across T'Sei's cheekbone, as if she was bruised. More green reflected onto her tight-knuckled grip onto one of the levers. Ruanek had no idea how much time had passed. He looked out to the configuration of the stars in the distance, tried with his former Romulan Subcommander's training to classify them and where they were in relations to Romulus, but gave up. He was unused to seeing them from this direction, although of course that was hardly an excuse for someone so knowledgeable of the areas around Romulan space. Even if those areas were from the other side of the Neutral Zone than he was now. He looked at the star map, thinking hard, aware of the surrounding space after a quick moment, then realized his head blocked T'Sei's view of the map she likely needed more. He drew back quickly, nearly avoiding knocking her over, and found himself staring at one of her eyes. Funny, she wasn't glaring at him. With a little alarm, he realized she likely didn't have the strength to do so; her eyelids were already closing slightly and her head nodded forward on her chest. The green light of the map flickered on.

"T'Sei." She wasn't responding. He tentatively reached a hand forward, and her eyes snapped reluctantly awake. "How long has it been since you've slept?"

"Approximately 2.3 weeks."

_And if I sleep, I dream_, she thought, struggling to keep her eyes wide enough to see.

Something about her voice…she seemed almost reluctant to do so. Ruanek found himself frowning, puzzled, then let the thought go.

Wordlessly he let her close her eyes and resumed navigating from his controls. He seemed to tire more easily than Vulcans, but he would wake her later if necessary.

.`

_If I sleep, I dream…_ It should have been a warning.

_The desert took its own, and those that were not its own. A strange desert, so far from the one the Quiet Ones still lived in and that the Angry Ones forsook for their new planet, countless years before…all this was a haze in her mind, one she did not know. The ground once again was close, and her hair long and tangled and different in her face, but this too was sharply unnoticed. Instead, her thoughts were quick and calculating: what will kill me, what to run from—the angry copper heat of the sun, the others unseen around, or—_

_Quick wakefulness started all of her senses at once. Something was wrong. It wasn't the constant warning in her blood, in the imperceptible hum of the heat and the tiny desert-dwelling creatures that eluded her today. Her heart beat fast as that hum, but sharper, like knives…she clutched the knife in its wrappings at her waist. It wasn't survival. Something made her wake. The ground ahead of her wasn't empty: a dark form slammed into her sight. Her eyes had abruptly picked out the details, and the scalding sun was unforgiving on the motionless face. There was a faint scent of harshly sunburned skin, even after death. She should move to shelter, away from this body, but recognition of the face gripped at her. _

_He had died. Why had he died? So many harsh real answers to that, but no cause could be seen as yet. Something overtook the practicality within her and bound her feet to the ground as her gasping breath came like more knives, a featureless dread rising like a sun within her. He was dead, so young, she was young, she had to leave—but she knew she must leave—and she did not know 'leave'; this world was all there was, was the hell it was named for and all reality…_

_As unwillingly she moved forward, she fell to the ground. Scrabbling with bare, scrappy arms at the burning sand to right herself, she became face to face with the dead boy. Her age, but now, no—his face up close was one which the dreamer recognized. She screamed, her voice continuing…_

"Ruanek!"

She fell forward. She wasn't in desert; no, it was darkness lit by green and points of light—

Darkness lightened to gray and then became shapes. T'Sei felt first the smoothness of their drifting through space then saw a figure slumped at the controls. Her heartbeat felt unsteady and strange but receded as she moved quickly forward and hauled Ruanek away. He was so deep asleep that he gave no resistance and there was no movement of his eyes beneath his eyelids. She was surfacing as if from a dream…

_I have to leave, I have to leave_, an unfamiliar-voiced part of herself thought even as she calculated distances and figures and saw they were by the Romulan Neutral Zone. The ship was in control, and yet it wasn't; she was bound temporarily by logic as reaction to shock, but something else moved the controls and blurred her sight after, for a wild moment as the scout craft careened, perfect stars froze across her vision and she despaired.

She was falling; she was falling into her own memories, wordless from far youth, and for a moment she thought she saw through another's eyes, in brighter colors from finally-unsuppressed emotion, on a world where it had rained for the first time.

Yet even that did not stop a vague awareness, and one that feared irrationally that he had died.


	6. Part VI: Romulan Neutral Zone

She didn't know how long she had been unconscious. The darkness had not stopped being darkness. It was crushing. T'Sei became aware that she could not breathe. Everything was gray until she realized the gray was a physical thing and it had no form; smoke choked her lungs. She couldn't see how far it went or the space around her, but lunged wildly with a panicking memory, hoping wildly her hands would connect with something. A handle, a hatch, a door, perhaps. She crawled, practically at a run, scrambling out of the darkness, and registered only that she was standing on ground before she was far back enough to see. The tiny, somewhat-triangular scoutcraft had smoke billowing angrily out of it, dark killing smoke. From the distinctive smell, she guessed it was some vital part of the ship's propulsion. T'Sei did not stand there long enough for the smoke haze to clear out of her eyes, but dove madly back in, lowered herself from the hatch-window and began scrambling around, part calm analytical thought and part irrational thought. The hard curve of one of the chairs made itself apparent. She moved her hand to the left, coughing—the other seat could be there—but only a jagged edge met her fingers, fingers that stung. The darkness was spinning and becoming lighter. With a strength that lay at the edge of reason, she pulled herself out of the wreckage. Her mind was spinning as she ignored and yet saw the landscape around her horrifically clearly. The ground, the small hills around were not damaged, but the ship—

"I couldn't find him," she found she was saying. "He should have been there. He was right there next to me; his seat should have been there, he should have been in it…there was no body, no blood, no…"

If Ruanek had been anything other than this mysteriously, this utterly hope-devoid gone and likely suffocated, he would have been worried at the rising edge in the half-Vulcan's voice.

With only the appearance of calm, and even less thought, she strode somewhat shakily in whatever direction she confusedly decided, and then straight forward. Perhaps it was ironic that T'Sei was so undamaged from the crash on the planet she couldn't even locate from the surface—she had no controls, no map, no Romulan knowledgeable of the Neutral Zone and of Romulus—

_Ruanek—_

Her cloak still around her shoulders was relatively clean, unmarred by her journey. The smoke had not done anything. There was a burn at the back of her neck, a painful reminder but not so painful as loss. Her fingers burned steadily in a different way. She realized they were dripping green blood onto the short, strangely triangular grass, and methodically, numbly found a bandage for them among the contents of her pockets. Her vaguely Romulan clothing she had changed into before even seeing Ruanek or commandeering his ship—the memory of that beginning still burned harsher than blood; would they have been something more akin to friends had she simply stayed at Vulcan and let her mother realize all T'Sei didn't completely know herself?—was spotless but for dust. Her hair was fine, her face dust free, but her eyes burned and were still widened and wild. She couldn't find it within herself to be calm within as without. She wasn't even comforted by the ridiculous thought that _perhaps she could go into Medical; her bandaging had been perfect, even under stress. And for a cadet…_

_But even medical officers do not endanger others' lives_, T'Sei thought both bitterly and numbly. _And no-one in Starfleet chases memories that aren't their own and even think of endangering everything for such a foolish cause._

She noted her wound had stopped bleeding and was only throbbing a little from the tight bandage. That was good. She didn't care.

_But if the cause had not been changed, if—if it had not been stopped, then you would have been like this—no, worse—for all your life, perhaps, unless you decided to end it…_

T'Sei dismissed all such thoughts with uncharacteristic gloom that was entirely justified.

There was nothing odd about a seemingly-Romulan woman entering a bar on a planet so close to the Neutral Zone, and in the crowd of light- and dull-clothed people, she was practically unnoticed except by perhaps a few traders and the occasional raving drunk who stopped speaking for a moment to whistle at her loudly before slumping with a bang onto the counter. She had stopped thinking. She knew the memories were at bay, with an uncertain knowledge. Her thoughts were becoming more and more different by the moment. Instead, she picked out easily, numbly, a Romulan woman with slightly shifty eyes and a guarded expression began to speak to her with some forced enthusiasm, not a small amount of curiosity, and a fierce hardness that now came easily to her.

A little bit of T'Sei died. If only for a moment.

If she were her mother, she would have been wildly curious and wary around any Romulan. If she were half-Romulan, if her past was…

T'Sei's eyes widened. She felt dizzy for a moment. From a difficult memory of her own, she heard a familiar voice, the words just beyond her understanding and reach. Two silhouetted figures speaking to each other, panic, sadness at memories reawakened…The woman did not notice; she was coolly sipping a tiny glass of blue liquid and motioning not to have a refill—this trader had interesting business just come to her, and would be leaving shortly.

`.

In fact, T'Sei had been noticed at the bar, and not entirely in the way she had thought and dismissed.

The dark-haired man had been glaring into his glass of bright alcohol, potent stuff that didn't help at all. He was tense, his elbows hard against the table. Something about him made him not as difficult to see as the slightly smoky haze of the bar and the lack of strong lighting made most of the people. A particularly heated argument was going on in the distance, and some sort of trade and ship chartering, as usual. He flinched as each arguer spoke, though their words were unintelligible from where he was. He shook his shaggy head and groaned as he understood the point one was making. This was so painful, but he had had to escape…

Eric was in a mood. The dim lighting and bright colors, and obscurity in a crowd, were doing nothing to make it better. Being in a crowd _hurt_, though it made him feel less alone. He had run from something violent, the all-too-readable emotions of his…his no-longer-wife. The all-too-recent memories of that enveloped him so thoroughly in despair that while the thoughts and feelings of the other bargoers threaded through the back of his mind like the smoke in the air, his noticing was delayed. It was too late, as he sat up with a bang from his stool, eyes wide and alert.

_That's got to not be good._

He cursed himself for being so wrapped up in his own problems. The tumultuous, oddly strong feelings had only registered slightly to him: he'd only noticed _fear_ and _anger_ and _guilt_ and _many-minds-as-one._ A stronger signal than any other he had encountered before. Something frightening and terribly interesting, as if he hadn't already been riveted by those eyes. It was what lay beneath them…

Too late, now. He saw only curly reddish-brown-dark hair and the back of her cloak. She was exiting the bar through some impossible door he certainly couldn't access. She seemed to have chartered a spaceflight, and one that likely would come to no good, considering her thoughts. Eric started at a run for the exit, managing to knock over a few glasses in a careful diversion. A drunk apologized for the Betazoid's actions and Eric took this chance to bolt for the right door. The Romulan woman glared at him, after he'd run the fastest in his life. It was enough, though, for the wide-eyed other Romulan—_not a Romulan_, he realized, _and that's going to make things difficult…and easier_—to stare in his direction. He was caught for a moment by her cheekbones and her mouth and heavy eyelids, then shook himself out of it and desperately thought a single word at her as he grabbed her arm, stalling her for a moment. He wished desperately that he could convince her, _Don't do it._

But T'Sei caught instead a single word, which had been the dark-haired man's intention, though she didn't know it at the time.

It was in Romulan, but she had heard this word before.

_Thierrull. _

_Hellguard._

She continued walking, and in a low voice gave the Romulan woman slightly different directions. But her mind was racing. She began to remember, memories of her own, all of them unsettling truths.

The dark-haired man had gone quietly back through the exit, his quietness quite contrasting with the race of thoughts and realizations inside his head. He too remembered something, but something far different that perhaps T'Sei herself had not known. A man, many years ago, perhaps before the Vulcan—_well, she's not entirely Vulcan, either, is she_—had been born…then again, he had always had difficulty telling Vulcans' ages, even though as a Betazoid, he could, in a sense, read minds. They hid it well. And this was a particularly troubled Vulcan…Romulan…whatever.

_A man near death, dying from an unknown wasting disease. He had come into the bar, asking if there was a Vulcan who could perform a mind meld on him, for he had little time left to live. He found Eric, instead, and spoke of a planet now abandoned, where many horrors had happened. Eric had tried to forget, but the man's thought-images of the other children on this planet had lingered in Eric's subconscious and made him at edge with his wife. And the woman who had just left perhaps towards death, perhaps to exact a sort of justice, looked so very similar to the wild girl in the dying hybrid's thoughts that it was almost unsettling._

Although that was not what made Eric fear for her life. He knew too much to assume that she would be fine facing what she would face. Everything he had tried to forget he tried now to remember. Unconsciously he mimicked one of the motions the half-Romulan half-Vulcan had noticed the girl making. His fingers went to his waist and grasped there for something, a knife perhaps, so lost was Eric in another's memories and so fiercely he willed for the woman's protection.

He realized he wasn't quite acting like himself and shook his head, letting his arm lie still. He was walking towards the normal exit at a quick pace. The bartender frowned, puzzled at how easily the dark-haired man seemed no longer drunk, then leaned forward to take the glass of a definitely drunk man who had toppled to the ground. Eric realized a little of the rush of image-thought-fears that had rushed into his mind as he saw the half-Vulcan-quarter-Romulan-quarter-human woman, and grasped at an idea. He knew he was going somewhere, and that something would happen. Something important. He grinned, then his grin died as he saw angry billowing smoke on the horizon beyond the low hills common to this planet.

He took off at a run towards the wreckage, an almost Vulcan-like aspect of his mind thinking very fast and realizing not a few things.


	7. Part VII: Romulan Space

She was still shaken from the crash and the urgency of everything that came afterwards, but more shaken by the sudden clearing of her mind. Movement and actions still took on a strange surreality to T'Sei as she walked towards the Romulan woman's ship that sat in an unproclaimed corner of the outside of the bar, a little ways away from any grass so as not to start a fire by weapons tests. It was a small ship as Romulan ships go, slightly larger than Ruanek's ship but certainly no scout ship or military vessel. All of this T'Sei took in and readily accepted with an odd, removed part of herself that seemed instinctual. She hadn't dreamed for a while, only been…guided…

In the loss of momentum following her confusion and brief realization, T'Sei felt suddenly bereft of something and unsure. She stood in front of the Romulan ship, wordless, thinking of her childhood. The only thoughts that pressed into her mind were muted, as if waiting. For now, without anything to charge her thoughts electric with recognition, all reference points to a life not her own somewhere ahead, she fell bewilderingly back into herself in a single instant. Seeing herself reflected on the cool dark hull of the Romulan ship was like seeing a stranger you realize you knew a long time ago. The world was briefly disorienting and she felt only remote and alone. Even as her heartbeat quickened again and her muscles tensed as she walked into the trader's ship, a familiar part of herself was left standing and staring at the sky, wondering at the years that had gone past, and T'Sei knew as well that whatever lay quiescent within her at the moment, whatever caused the foreign memories and dreams, thought the same but also waited with fearful anticipation for whatever came next.

.`

The Romulan trader already knew the planetary objective had been changed, in the heated pace of footsteps and turned corners. She had a cool mind for a Romulan, one that missed few details. But something about this change might have upset that mind, at least for a moment, so that while she kept walking, the part of her that understood was shaken and kept seeing stars, and space, and things far past.

Perhaps it was something that could be lost with different thoughts. But no; Evine had tried to lose that particular aspect of her mind in detail and fervent wish to survive. It did no good to dwell on the past when the present could kill you in a single moment, trip you up and leave you dead. She recalled herself, much younger, a sharp-faced child staring in horror at what she had seen, the dark-cloaked people around her uncaring and hurrying while the sound of far death played in tinny audio across the streets. She did not wish to remember, but that destination…perhaps she must…no. Survival meant more. Evine looked forward at the ship's console in the half-light and then to the side, into the eyes of the passenger, then looked away.

She keyed in swiftly the coordinates, noticing that the woman behind her held a jutting part of the bulkhead with a white-knuckled grip as she saw the stars rushing past. Evine did not see the woman's eyes grow suddenly unfocused, saw only the red-orange of the words and figures on the controls before her. She was thinking hard and fast.

Space drew onward, shocked and frozen stars running through the Romulan's memory as in reality the ship moved nearly too fast to see them.

It was difficult to outrun your memories, but more difficult to outrun reality. The dark corridors were there, but never always appeared that way. Reality gave you little choice: do this or die. Even beyond Romulan space. A small part of Evine, the part that did not wish to run her own honor blade through herself rather than submit to the Federation, thought that perhaps she could escape anything if only she was not on Romulus. It was not so.

Romulan did not quite come slowly to her, but had an edge of ill-recognized confusion behind the automatic knowledge of the language, the instincts of what to do, how to act…perhaps all beings were the same, confronted with the same problems, when in utter fear; it slowed thought.

_Akkh, I do not wish to do this._

She did not know as much about where she went—where she would go—as the mysterious woman who had demanded desperately that she be taken there. But the part of her that refused to kill that memory of what she had witnessed on the homeworld in childhood, that part barely reawakened, pounded at her senses quietly. The Romulan knew she could conquer most fears and ill things in the world, but that it was not the entire reality: any confidence she had was undercut now, harshly, with that small warning, deadly serious: _Be afraid. Or you will be caught unawares, and then you will be dead._

The destination they were really approaching was perhaps not what her passenger had asked for in the end, but would keep them alive a little longer. Evine tried to keep that in mind, but instead ended up thinking bitterly of all she wished she had left behind on Romulus.

`.

T'Sei's dreams were uncertain, as if they could not become memories anymore. She never stayed on one image long enough to understand it; they moved faster than the ship she could barely sense moving.

She did realize, however, that they had turned.

It took a moment for everything around her to gain clarity and meaning, but from the positions of the stars that were now apparent ahead and not unclear from the ship's speed, it took an even shorter moment for T'Sei to understand that this planet they approached was not the one she had asked for passage to. Though slight exhaustion made T'Sei's movements unsure, she walked forward in the half-darkness and looked disapprovingly at the Romulan woman who was preparing to drop out of warp and enter the atmosphere of an increasingly familiar planet: Romulus.

T'Sei was caught for a moment by the planet growing steadily closer, then tore her gaze away and saw that the trader's eyes were tight and her movements reluctant. She seemed to be operating against her will. T'Sei wondered inwardly what this might mean, then shook her head free of the questions. It was too much to think at once, and to remember: memory, other memory, places, people, rebellion…

She realized she had moved intently forward to see the planet again, and maneuvered herself back to her seat. All was quiet for a moment, and then T'Sei asked, "Why?"

It seemed perhaps a little sharper than it should have been in the profound silence. Surprisingly, however, the trader answered in a low, quick voice, turning her eyes from the main viewscreen to urgently meet T'Sei's.

"Listen." She spoke rapidly, the words gaining a clarity that shook T'Sei out of any dream-confusion. Perhaps she spoke now, in space far to reach by any Romulan intelligence, because it was a far more serious matter than T'Sei had at first realized…"This is not something I would do if not for the lives in the balance. Years back, I left the homeworld with no more defining factors of my destination than _away_. As far away as I could get was the Neutral Zone, but I have not been able to escape that which made me leave. I warn you, if I take you myself to where you are headed for, I cannot say that you can trust my actions. They are bound by very old ties I cannot escape with my life—"

The Romulan's words were cut short as the ship jolted slightly in re-entry. She moved towards the controls of the ship, and T'Sei registered a look of surprise across her features in a strangely long moment before the ship lurched again and the trader was knocked sideways, T'Sei with her. She had inadvertently reached out an arm sharply to stop her fall and her hand had struck against the other woman's head for an instant. T'Sei froze, catching a flicker of thoughts and memories as they both righted themselves.

_That's probably not good._

What little telepathic ability she had was usually not enough to start a mind meld, or even for her to pick up thoughts or emotions from minimal contact—not that she'd really tested this possibility before. T'Sei shook her head. The events around her seemed slowed a little, as if they were lagging behind when they were actually happened; the Romulan ship's descent into its planet's atmosphere seemed inordinately long to T'Sei. Images pressed brightly against her vision but without complete understanding. She blinked, slightly nauseated, then the memory of the Romulan's mind receded slightly and T'Sei could see properly around her. What she saw was that the trader, having finally gotten the ship under control, seemed a little confused as well. It was a slow moment after the ship touched down into a shady, unnoticed corner of the spaceport in Ki Baratan, that the trader remarked as she seemed to gain comprehension of recent events, "I think I know who you might want to see, and how I may bypass these restrictions placed on me." T'Sei saw that the Romulan's hand went briefly to her side where perhaps an honor blade lay concealed, and that with fierce desperation she grinned and turned and was fast out of sight.

`.

As Evine ran, she almost wished the knife at her side would make some sort of noise, alert the sharp-eyed passersby in the narrow streets between the red stone buildings that cluttered together. But it had been far too long a time of being watched, being fearful, that gave her the almost automatic instinct to keep any weapon concealed close to her skin. It was that which she would change soon, and perhaps a younger Evine would have been frightened at the monumental difference in her life soon to come, and in the possibility of death. But too many years running, avoiding…she thought of those children, long ago, running, many to die in the desert and by each others' hands but many more whose spirits would die in returning to their homeworld that hated them but had begotten them.

Everything was unraveling, she would have thought if she was younger. But that part of herself had been awakened, the part that felt pain, the part that noticed.

And when confronting something that had been unnoticed for years…how many of those children had died without Romulus' notice?

All of them. All save a few.

And to have seen the fire in those few's eyes extinguished after years in the world that congratulated their genetics but used them to further Romulan society like a soulless machine…shock, Evine knew, could keep anger and sometimes justice at bay for a long time. But it had been Romulus, and fear of the man she would now put an end to, he and his 'eyes' watching, controlling…it had been that fear and that instinct for survival that had stopped her from previous memory and feeling. And in that thought, she had taken her ship and left, years ago, for the Neutral Zone, but some things could not be escaped.

And yet the small part of her that did not concentrate rapidly not on surroundings or only brief survival, or of how swiftly she had overcome the desire not to kill that had weakened her and been her undoing in the past, was ashamed.

_But I remembered._

She thought, puzzled, for a moment as she ran, of the enigmatic woman she had taken to Romulus instead of somewhere she would have gone and faced headlong, come life or death. Something unsure, unrealized in her mind that nevertheless pushed her forward to do something she barely understood.

_It is not places, but people and memory of places that lies ahead._

Her passenger was a mystery, and that brief, unplanned plunge into both their minds both left Evine more confused than ever except for understanding of the woman's purpose, and took over whatever thoughts of hers that weren't fixed on the weak, fatal places on a Romulan man's body, so that as Evine finally went through a little-used doorway, she was beginning to remember faces that she had only seen as children, whose odd reckless determination in the face of horrors she had seen in the face of someone they would soon meet.


	8. Part VIII: Romulus

"It is done," T'Sei heard long after nightfall. She had been looking at the moons in the deep blue of Romulus' sky, thinking wordless thoughts and oddly unperturbed by the greenery that would have died on Vulcan but which was scattered throughout what little of the sundered world she could see from the spaceport, until she heard the single oddly-accented sentence and turned until she was looking into the face of the woman who had given her transport and now stood shadowing one of the moons. Her dark eyes were fierce and pensive, her face pale, likely from some form of shock.

_Which she undoubtedly has, having killed a man._

Still, T'Sei was slightly surprised that the trader was so affected by a single, necessary death. From what little T'Sei knew about Romulans, they were not so averse to the taking of lives of those of their own and of others…T'Sei blinked and repressed a wave of incomprehensibly fast images that ran through her mind at the thought, obscuring her sight, but failed to stop the faint shudder that came over her.

The trader didn't notice. She was looking fixedly ahead. "I saw the life leave his eyes…it is done. We can leave this place." She seemed to notice the green-stained knife she held and cleaned it efficiently by plunging it into the ground in such a way that the blood would not be visible in the morning and then binding it tightly inside the weapons-harness somewhere beneath her shirt.

T'Sei nodded, just as she noticed that the Romulan was shaking her head, completely drained of color now. "Wait," she said to T'Sei as much as to herself, "there is someone you should see first. I do not remember the way. Wait here."

She seemed to gain composure, though some form of doubt crossed her face as she began to walk away from the spaceport's darkness and disappeared into the night as she had disappeared into the daylight many hours before. T'Sei brought her arms around her knees, drew her cloak around herself, and looked again at the moons without seeing.

`.

At some point in the morning, the pale, slightly harsh light of the Romulan sun, Eisn, woke her from her thoughts. T'Sei had an urge to move that she did not entirely understand beyond _must not be recognized_ and the sense of warning far back in her mind. She drew herself upwards, barely looking around her except for a brief glance to see that the spaceport was still unusually empty, attempted and failed to stretch the tension out of the sore spots in her limbs, and walked quickly into the ship. She could make out vague shapes in the near-darkness, for a small amount of light filtered in through the hatch. Searching for a moment, she found spare clothing among the Romulan woman's belongings, and, with a swift mental apology, changed into the nondescript shirt and pants. Only grayness lay behind her eyes as she closed them for a moment, a sign she wasn't sure how to take. She opened them.

It had taken about a minute for her to change, but more light trailed upon the inside surfaces and consoles of the ship already. She moved towards something particularly bright and reflective, found a hard, cylindrical shape, and realized it was a container. She poured a tiny amount of water onto her face and hands and then ran them through her hair—

_Water, water she stood in the thrall of. In harsh daylight, she had seen water so little in her life that it was as a foreign object, and so she reached a hand forward cautiously, saw that the water behaved curiously and made her skin and hair different. But she did not trust it. Trust was dangerous in a place that could kill you. Arms tense against the dry ground, she crept forward, still wary of this new thing. Her face screwed tight in a quick frown as it did not attack or retreat; in a flash, she stuck her knife into it and bemused, saw that nothing happened. She had to be certain that it was dead; it smelled no different than before…odd. It had no smell. It had no taste, and—she yelled at her sudden reflection. It was looking at her. A face stared in her face and moved away as she moved away. She gave it a wary berth of trust so long as it did not attack her. The eyes no longer looked too wide in a face too sharp and a body too thin and small…she pushed a wildly tangled strand of hair out of her face…_

_Later, she trusted the water long enough to partake of it in the daytime, and the edge of her starved thirst was abated. She saw, when the water was bright enough to hurt her eyes, as the sky was, and she moved in front of it to darken it, her reflection had changed but the face was the same—_

T'Sei moved quickly out of the ship, breathing hard as she emerged into the sunlight. It took a moment for her thoughts to settle and for her to understand why her hands, her arms, her body was so large, so changed, so much taller than—and that when she stepped down, her feet were covered and strangely encumbered and the sun did not burn her skin—

There was someone standing in the sunlight. T'Sei shook her head and everything around her made sense. As she came back into her own awareness, she understood that the Romulan woman had returned and with an incredible urgency, saw T'Sei and motioned for her to follow her. As they took off at a run, the Romulan trader said, "Something terrible has happened—"

Many thoughts rushed through T'Sei's mind, though most of them were predominantly confusion. She had no time for that, however, as a dark shape vaulted out of a side street and a brighter, smaller shape collided with the trader ahead of her, who stumbled and then sharply fell. In a rush of vivid sound and sight and a simultaneous dulling of it, T'Sei saw green and more green and a pale, shocked face, dark hair, and cobblestones…she nearly tripped over the woman she had been with for days but didn't even know the name of, then hauled her into her arms and then over her shoulder as the streets sped by and T'Sei, without the first thought of where to go, surrendered her mind to whatever consciousness or thoughts drove her actions. The movement of her muscles was sharp and familiar. She saw desert around her for an overwhelming instant, the ground once again closer and more deadly, as was the sun…she was running; she had run before…and felt the world fall away and dim.


	9. Part IX: Unknown Location

"_… Aeek'h'i 'hh 'ie 'nhqh?_" she heard as colors slowly began forming from gray. She sensed movement. Her mind snapped to somewhat of an understanding and recognized the language as Romulan.

"Are you awake?" the voice continued.

T'Sei opened her eyes with an effort, sight bleeding into place. Leaning above her was a Romulan man roughly her father's age, she guessed somewhat dizzily. His gaze was intense with something she recognized, akin to a frantic panic, and his face was at once sharp and haggard but lost some of its edge as T'Sei garbled some Romulan response. Her side felt curiously light. She felt along it; her knife was missing.

"I took it," the man said from somewhere behind her. "You may need it later." There was a hard edge of…something…in his voice, and unsurety about her condition, but his words all seemed worn, as if he had been in similar situations before, in her place, not his own. She tried to decipher his meaning, decided she couldn't, and instead tried to stand up. She had been lying on a sort of narrow cot, one that was far from the ground, which swayed a little beneath her until she closed her eyes a moment and mastered her breathing. She did not remember all that had happened; if she thought about it, her mind either panicked or came up against a slight wall, one she did not want to cross until she knew more about where she was. She felt as if she had lost energy in a staggering wave, was slightly shocked she had never felt that way before.

_What…_

"Blood loss," she heard. T'Sei felt slightly green, and entirely drained.

She realized that as she had stood up, she had turned to face the Romulan. She wondered, for a quick moment, looked at him askance—

His eyes kept giving her some visceral reaction, as if she had seen him as the victim of a crime or in a long-forgotten dream. He held bandages; she realized her hands felt tight and slightly cumbersome and didn't sting as they had—before. Her wounds must have re-opened. For a short second neither of them spoke; he looked weary.

"I couldn't analyze it to find your house name and thus be able to identify you as no longer missing—you've been in a light coma for days." He spread his hands outward apologetically. "I have little medical equipment that advanced. In a way, I am thankful for it; I rarely come across anyone in favor with the current government and would rather not be noticed. It is so easy to die here."

She breathed easier. Somehow, what he said made sense, though she didn't entirely understand it herself. She started to walk forward and notice that the building she was in was small, spare and rough-walled with a low ceiling and a single shelf that held several medical objects vaguely similar to ones she had seen in the basic medical training she had gotten as a cadet. She had nearly gone into Medical, but chose Science instead…Movement distracted her from her exploration of the building. The Romulan man was walking over to a far corner of the room she hadn't noticed before. She stared, frozen, at the form she could see there, then noticed the entirety of the doctor—he must be a doctor—and that his foot and leg dragged slightly when he walked. Her heart went out to him. Why hadn't she noticed his limp before? All her memory just before arriving and upon arrival here was muted or gone, but echoes of it ran sharply across her mind as she saw who lay wounded on the other cot.

The Romulan doctor, if that was what he was, didn't look up as T'Sei walked over and crouched next to him. His face was even more drawn and tense than she had seen before. Clearly the trader's wound was serious. T'Sei pushed back a blanket from over the woman's midsection and saw a bandage wider than her head wrapped that area. They sat for a moment, watching the Romulan woman's labored breathing, until unexpectedly her dark haired head turned, the woman's face much paler than T'Sei had ever seen. She turned her body too, after a slow moment, wincing at what seemed unendurable pain. A meaningful look passed between her and T'Sei for an instant, then the woman's gaze shifted. The doctor shook his head, face tightening in shock, but the trader reached a hand to her side. Near the bandages and no longer green-stained, and now grasped in a shaking fist, was her honor blade. The woman's message was clear: I have survived enough to die now.

T'Sei could only see the pain in the doctor's eyes as he lowered the woman's arm that loosened the blade and let it fall to the floor, and reached instead for something resembling a hypospray. There was a sharp thud, a hiss, and a long silence.

Then T'Sei asked, "Evine?" Pieces of memory stung her mind in shards: green and green again, blood-green, outside a wreckage, and all over a woman fallen in the street…

"Dead," the doctor said, unperturbed by the use of the woman's fourth, personal name. "She was close to dying when you brought her here. But you—"—he looked over at her, slight grief still apparent on his features from the death he had helped, but a strange expression overtaking it—"—were pained by something different."

"You did not know her name before," he continued quietly.

"My memory has been…different," she said tightly. And then, "it hurts…and I cannot understand it. Some of the most recent part of it is beginning to return. The rest is there, and something else I cannot understand."

He nodded and stood swiftly. "I told you you may need your knife," he began. "I wish there was more time for your recovery, but there is little time to spare.

"She spoke to me before she died, while you were in a healing trance…"

So that was why there was so much understanding in his expression, why he did not ask who she was. It did not explain why he looked so familiar.

"I understand perhaps more than she did why you feel compelled to go where you are about to, but not entirely. From what she told me, I know where to find the others she would have taken you to if she was still alive. If they are still alive. But everything depends on your memory returning," he said.

_Have I known you?_ she wondered as another moment passed in silence. He seemed concerned beyond the concern for a patient's recovery, and in a different way than the sharp, intense fear and anticipation she had recognized in him. But she had not seen him in the past…in her past…

He handed her her knife, which she accepted wordlessly, and they walked out of the building in pondering silence. Her minor injuries were at the very back of her mind, seeming now trivial and unimportant. Instead, she struggled to piece together what little the doctor had told her, and let the thoughts overtake her mind. There was confusion at first, memories too fast to follow, and still the memories that weren't hers did not entirely make sense. They, too, receded until they were on the periphery of her thoughts as she followed the Romulan down the sunset-lit alleyways towards the edge of the city.


	10. Part X: Outside The City

It was like torture, not telling her, he thought. He had endured worse before, but there was a chance neither of them would live. Not all that Evine—inwardly, he apologized that that was the only name he knew the dead woman by—had told him he understood; some of it was purely Vulcan and incomprehensible. He did not entirely know what would happen next, either, only that Evine wished to direct T'Sei to the place they now approached, the people inside it. He wondered if they would remember him, wondered if T'Sei had guessed. He wished he could ease her pain somehow, but instead held himself tightly away. She needed to know only what would help her, or everything could go terribly wrong. Evine had died…perhaps everything already had.

T'Sei was startled out of her explorative thoughts when the doctor spoke.

"Your hands. The bandages may prove problematic; I need to see if the cuts on your fingers have healed. They were lateral and crossed very few capillaries; the bleeding has likely stopped by now."

T'Sei nodded. She could no longer recall what she had been thinking before he spoke. It was vaguely frustrating, but she put it out of her mind. They moved into the warm shadow of a building T'Sei guessed was not far from where they were going. She felt no pain as the bandages were unwound, and looked down, seeing only unbroken, slightly green-scarred skin across her palm and her first three fingers. The doctor's expression was impassive, then relieved, as T'Sei stretched her hand and her fingers and the skin did not break.

T'Sei was startled again when he spoke. The sun was far from rising; night had almost fallen. Somehow the absence of the sun in the sky beyond the buildings bothered her immensely; she felt uneasy.

"Do you trust me?"

Her eyes narrowed in honest confusion. "Something within me says I do."

Thoughtful confusion spread across his face. They walked onward, but this time she noticed her surroundings and again, the man's limp. For the remaining stretch, she supported some of his weight and the limp stopped somewhat but his steps still hinted at it. No thoughts came into T'Sei's mind at the contact.

It was far into the empty reaches outside the city T'Sei did not remember entering that a lone building stood, obscured by plants and bare, low hills. She could not see the horizon or the city clearly anymore, only the walls of the house ahead. Something made her stop in her approach, just before they reached the outer wall. She looked ahead, seeing the last of the sky's remaining light just barely reveal the lines of the walls.

"It is this," she said, then, looking aside, saw that the doctor had held back from approaching any further, face torn with conflict. He masked it quickly. Night fell, and his concern sharpened. It still transformed his features as they entered after he knocked and spoke rapidly in Romulan, then drew aside and spoke quickly and deeply to the figures in the courtyard beside the house inside the walls, emotions passing too fast over his face in the firelight for T'Sei to understand. He returned, his face serious, and motioned for her to join them.

T'Sei was still trying to understand something she had noticed as the doctor and the woman had spoken. It grew more apparent as they spoke again in a language she only caught a few words of Romulan in: something about _danger_ and _death_ and _meetings_ and _years…you…again_ and she could see their faces more clearly. As she drew nearer to the fire and the people in the shadows, she could see there were others beside the one she had noticed, and they stood or sat, tall and grim and afraid, and two children stood a little ways away from the woman, a boy too serious for his years who held a smaller child that kept squirming and trying to attract his attention by speaking in the same broken Romulan. She looked at them for a long moment, and then her attention was drawn back towards the faces of the woman and the doctor. The firelight flickered across both their features, the high contours of their faces, the similarity in their flashing eyes.

The emotion that gripped the doctor struck at T'Sei's memory. She had seen something similar, perhaps once in her life: features showing less emotion, a woman speaking to someone half-seen by T'Sei when she was very young…the doctor turned to her. The light briefly burned across his face again and something wordless within T'Sei understood the connection. Her next few breaths came with difficulty; she recognized the way in which what she had heard rose and fell, and some of the basic formation of the language. And the faces…the doctor seemed to realize that T'Sei had been silent, staring, for some time. A blur of dark and light in T'Sei's peripheral vision: the woman nodded, seeming to understand or confirm something the doctor had said.

T'Sei, upon breathing again, spoke to the doctor; for a moment, he had seemed lost in thought…

"Your face is familiar," she told him, caught on the edge of some momentous discovery.

He was very still. So much unspoken…

"I've been trying to remember, over the past day," she continued, "and your face kept stopping me because it was so familiar." She leaned forward and traced the contour of the bones around his eyes, the shape between his cheek and his jawbone, feeling almost dizzy with recognition. "See? My mother has this. You have her eyes, the shape of her chin…"

He seemed almost pained. Some unfathomable expression crossed his face and would not leave, and he nodded. It became apparent to T'Sei that the entire time she had seen him, he seemed about to say something.

"Saavik." He nodded again. "The genetics of all of us are uncertain, but I believe she and I shared a father." It was not a happy admission for him, she could see in his face.

"Romulan," T'Sei confirmed. "Perhaps that is why you did not tell me…"

He shook his head vehemently, and his voice came, if possible, more intensely than before. "I did not know until Evine told me. So many of us have died. I suspected, when you found me, but speculation is not fact. Many of us do not know our parents. Evine had seen the databanks before they were destroyed. It was painful for her to witness, but I forgive her for forgetting. It kept her sane…"

T'Sei was thinking very fast. Many things that had lain dormant in her mind for years were beginning to make sense, but the scale of her realization made some of it all the more incomprehensible. Her head hurt slightly; she had not slept, again, for days. But everything around her was sharp and vivid; she felt alive. And she felt fear, a great warning at the brink of understanding, something that would become apparent. Something, if she were entirely herself, she would have run from. But she did not know herself anymore…she found she was speaking. She had stood up, and faced the people whose faces she now saw more clearly in the light of memory.

"I have seen you all before," she said slowly, "but much younger, from the memories of another…"

She nearly swayed on her feet, but the doctor steadied her. Her uncle? Her half-uncle…it was all too much…

"On a different planet." Something in their faces marked them as in some way the same. It was unsettling and somewhat enervating to realize. She stood riveted with shock, memories of another place—of what they had endured—threatening to overtake her mind as she struggled to encompass the whole of what she knew.

"One someone had given me memories of." They were all looking at her, expressions so intense she could not decipher them, only their strength. The children looked at her in the same light of confusion as she had experienced overwhelmingly for the past few days.

"You are all from Hellguard." It was not a question, but a confirmation. Of course they were. And something had to be wrong, otherwise she wouldn't be here. She sat, hard, on the dusty ground. Someone put an arm across her shoulders briefly. Head whirling, she looked up into the face of the woman her uncle had spoken to and recognized fear. Not of her, but of something recent that had gone terribly wrong.

Her accent, now, made sense, as did her words. Their meaning was an undercurrent in T'Sei's mind that she had not recognized until hearing it.

"They are trying to kill us," she said in a voice weary from such revelations. Her eyes were hard. "One of them thought he succeeded, and killed Evine as her attempt to kill an assassin failed. He came here last night. One of the children noticed he was outside, watching. He did not tell us the man's description before he died."

T'Sei could see, in the fading light, an unmarked grave beyond the fire.

"We had to burn my son's remains…

"Tarek did not tell you he was your uncle because there is a chance we will all die. There is something beyond all of our knowledge in the memories in your mind, and while he does not understand it, he hoped that it would be enough to defeat this man. The doctor fears for all our lives, yours especially.

"We cannot fight this man. He has found ways to cripple all of us, and the government has forced a captive Vulcan to take many of our memories that would be useful from us. We do not even know who he is, only that he is—"—she spat bitterly upon the ground—"—an evil from our past. One we cannot fight.

"And so _you_ must."

T'Sei walked from the edge of the fire. There was too much in her mind shadowing the leaping of the flames, too many vivid images she did not wish to see but which could be the key to her survival, as surely and physically as if they were a weapon. The people, watching, their eyes bright sparks, saw as overcome, she held her head in her hands, closed her eyes, and did not move for the rest of the night.


	11. Part XI: Hellguard Memory

At some point, the woman who had spoken to her, Rhian, left what was growing to be the only illuminated space as night fell. A shadow against the horizon's shadow, she walked over to the shadows smaller than the rest and spoke to them, touched the older on the shoulder to signal she would take watch from him. He walked unwillingly into the house and gave the toddler to someone else to watch over, then returned after a shorter while. T'Sei was not aware of any of this.

Darkness pressed like fists against her closed eyes. At various intervals, she could sense herself moving or speaking, words coming to her faintly but naturally as if she had uttered them before. The edge of some great apprehensiveness took hold over her and stretched thin over her other thoughts, then broke and dissipated until she could recall faster than sight and her alertness sped as well. She could feel her knife tight in her fingers and turned it over and over, realizing that it still seemed like a foreign object, then fell into a deeper stillness that was punctuated with movements of her eyes beneath her eyelids as if she was fighting off something long gone.

Rhian's brows drew together sharply in worry as she passed T'Sei and saw her flickering eyelids and sudden muscle tension. The sight only punctuated her worry. She moved forward, faltered midstep and then turned and walked sharply over to Tarek. He had unconsciously shifted his weight onto one leg after standing for so long, and his eyes were unreadable except perhaps to her. He was never good at hiding thoughts from his face; they overtook it openly, even when he was a boy, in pain…But this did not stop her; his motives were still unclear as ever and sympathy towards him would only distract her.

Some change in the light from her movement towards him must have told him she approached; a series of slow-changing emotions gripped his features then passed away to reveal him more as she remembered: so much younger than all he had endured made him seem, so trusting and yet betrayed. Trouble still showed clearly in his eyes; he was unused to it, always surprised, inherently different from the Romulans.

"Why did you do this?" she asked a little more harshly than she intended—but she was afraid. She was what this world had made her: whole and yet worn away, constantly outrunning some form of fear.

She knew why, but she felt as if she did not know him completely. He seemed so different, so changed, older, another person, as she looked at the light and the darkness against his face.

He did not answer exactly as she expected.

"It is something I have noticed in nearly all living beings; they have a strength that is seldom realized. If I had done nothing, if I had assumed any less, all would be lost."

He was trying not to lose himself in the past, something he thought he had had control over for a long while now. So much had been revealed to him, and so much kept secret. So much he couldn't say.

"Know this only, Rhian. I am as concerned for her as for any of us, if not more. Any one of us could die. Not all of us could remember." There was some significance in his words that she couldn't entirely understand, though she thought of things Evine had not understood at all; Rhian wondered, as Ruanek had, about Vulcans. His thoughts had been absently curious, but hers were in desperation, as all the thoughts of the people here had been for nearly fifteen years. They had all wondered if they would survive, if one person was enough to rely on, if something had been irrevocably lost and with it, their cause. She had experienced some hope in knowing that T'Sei, so strangely still, knew at least a fragment of what they all could not remember and that that might be enough, but it was a frantic hope and one she did not trust. She found she was looking at T'Sei, and idly looked over at Tarek, saw he looked in that direction too. A sudden pained curiosity came to her: what must it be like, being a doctor, and having to cause pain? Having to ease death without being able to cure it? Having to stand by, unable to do anything to stop what instinct told him he must?

Painful. She could not know how painful…

Yes, she could. She had been too far to stop her son Analek from dying when she had heard his too-brief warning. And farther back, some law of the lawless in the desert of Hellguard had left her standing apart from the boy who lay broken on the burning sand and clutched his leg, howling in unendurable agony then falling silent and catching her gaze with a force she still could not match to this day, his eyes from beneath sharp straight cuts across his face riveting in their raw emotion. It had always shown in his face…

She became aware again of the present and saw she gripped Tarek's arm and felt the sadness he must be seeing in her eyes, let her hand fall.

"I know," she said, knowing he likely thought of what she remembered, and fell silent. They both worried, twin figures in the indiscriminate night, lit blazingly by the fire and the fear neither of them could hide.

Gradually, Tarek lapsed into memory as his eyelids flickered shut and then opened again. Perhaps it was in unconscious understanding of what was to come, perhaps in his fear, but something made his mind point to this memory in particular…

_The sand burned across his feet, stinging and hissing, but forgotten. It stung less than the raw fire of the cuts across his face, and memory blinded him. Instinctually, the boy Tarek flung an arm across his eyes, though he felt rather than saw the sun and blood smarted in his eyes and pulled his face into immobility. As he walked, he remembered, memory not fading but growing stronger with each struggling step._

_"You are not—" the man had said..._

_A man, above him, with a knife. The boy did not know at this age whether to trust or not to. If he wandered to where the other children were, where sound or images blared at them or other men showed them how to hurt and eventually gave up, or where they simply stood in lines, he saw confusion: are you we? Are we you? Are you running? Are you to die? They feared or did not care about the fact that he was apart, until he wasn't. He slowly forgot, but still his face was always hopeful, bright even as he was hit or forgotten. He did not know his own name; he had not been truly forged by anything, no pain until the inexplicable: the man. His early memories were dim at best…had this man been in them?_

_He had not been tied to a chair, but sat, confused. Cruel irony the man must have known, that the boy did not hide from pain. What was the man doing? Was it something he could explain later? The boy had heard so little explanation in his life, so few words that he could understand; he had not grown around the language the other children used, but this man's was familiar…_

_He was shocked at the two cuts on his brow. So shocked that at first he did not react, and it was as if his skin forgot to bleed. Then before the pain gave him memory and the boy's sight stung with blood, he saw the man's mouth twisting into words: "You are not—"_

_The rest was drowned out by the boy's screaming. Something inherent within him awoke from his unawareness. He felt everything that came after, his throat constricting with the sound he made, and then the burning sun outside as he hurled himself away, his legs moving as he ran sharply and stumbled. Some other pain somewhere on his body: it was a lesser fire, one that abated quickly. _

_He had recognized that man's face: he had seen it before. He did not run away from what he did not understand. He did not know what he was not. _

_Everything was agonizing. The sand, the rock, the marks still bleeding across his face. His nearly cracking feet. With the blood stinging into his eyes and then clearing, the exit from the darkness and the unknown into a brighter unknown, the single sound of force he had made in his life, the denial, he was born and the memory that stayed began. _

_For a long time, he had no name, none that the man had given him. It would be formed by something he barely heard, as he lay there as if to die._

_He walked further. Slowly he could see, though when he blinked, his eyelashes shone a dark, sticky green-black. His eyes no longer stung but burned with the sun and the sky. He had never been outside before; he thought it was perhaps inside another building, one vast and cruel. He abandoned that idea instinctually; it seemed no one found him here. They always found him when he was inside. He vaguely remembered being much younger and hiding away somewhere where the tall ones would not see him, and the other children's eyes afraid…for themselves, for him…and some hopeless…_

_Every physical thing burned itself into his awareness; he had not endured like this before. The scant muscles of his back tensed and his legs felt tight pressure as he walked with the rock around him throwing light and then dull after-rainbows that had been temporarily burned across his retinas. His breathing, harsh and knifelike, felt more alive than it had before. His hands grew slack as all energy in his arm was exerted from movement, and they fell heavy to his sides. An underscore in his memory to come, a forceful change, was the sharp crack as he stumbled and fell, tight-limbed to the ground, squinting up at the sky and then, exhausted, throwing a sun-seared arm across his eyes and willing it to stop. The sun grew, pounded, swelled, then faded. He could feel it against the undersides of his feet, and then he felt no longer._


	12. Part XII: Darkness

Something awoke T'Sei prematurely. It was a darker night than she remembered ever seeing, but still the faint moonlight showed a vague horizon, one that was obstructed by something that hadn't been there before.

She thought she had remembered Tarek approaching her sometime in the earlier hours of the night and then leaving, but only really remembered the physical feeling of a near presence, not whose it was. She glanced sideways: he stood as if half-asleep, looking in a different direction. Rhian, beside him, stiffened, seeing what T'Sei had seen come nearer. "Maiek," Rhian whispered nearly soundlessly to the boy who had already seen and looked back wide-eyed. He walked to his mother. Entirely silently, his eyes asked something significant, she shook her head, and he broke away and headed for the house, glancing back once in frustration.

T'Sei raised herself from her sitting position and crouched so she was slightly higher from the ground but unseen in the near-darkness by whoever approached. The form grew larger, the figure more defined—a man—and before sharp features could be distinguished, another shadow neared him and hissed. Rhian, unable to fight but knowing the man's evil; T'Sei knew her voice. T'Sei could barely see, but she heard and recognized the thud that followed, knew what it meant, and guessed that Tarek now rushed to where Rhian lay. Then there was no more hiding, for a moment: sparks flared from the fire she thought dead and showed her, briefly, the man's face she could barely make out. She darted a glance quickly to the side: Tarek had his head bent over Rhian's chest—examining a wound or searching for a heartbeat. She could not see his face.

There was an angry hiss, inorganic in nature. Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the light flared out, leaving pitch black. T'Sei, heartbeat not fast but level, moved in a silent running crouch towards the unseen assailant. It was not a sense that came naturally to her, but something that exploded behind memory and vision and built up frustration that showed with a strange ease where the man was, how he could not escape this time. A sense beyond sensing. With a far corner of her mind, T'Sei began to wonder at the memories given to her, and why they had not identified this man—

Wind rushed over her back and underneath her as she sprang and then collided with the hard, warm, and living: she knocked him to the ground, which hit her bone-sharp against her back as she rolled with her momentum and searched again without her eyes, trying inwardly to calculate his height, weight, and still wondering who he was. She could now hear the sound of his breathing, which she had not heard before she collided with him. Her cheekbone ached dully where it had knocked against a sharp object at his side.

Slowly she moved her head, barely breathing for the sake of silence. Her arms were braced against the ground; she turned and thought for a moment, then began again to run—

The firelight flared again and caught the man's eyes, closer than she had realized. T'Sei started, saw the calculation in his gaze. Steady now the light came; though red and angry, not spluttering like before. She was stuck with him knowing her position. She would try reacting with speed, not with thought. She circled and he circled warily like a hunter. She could see so little of him but his movement and eyes; smoke obscured his face…T'Sei gripped her knife tighter, did not think about any of her training in Starfleet or on Vulcan. She thought not of eyes, but of weaknesses, but something was breaking through her resolve.

One of them darted towards the other, one struck, one missed. She felt no pain: she had cut him across his forearm, she realized: her eyes were fixed it, for that hand held a long knife that caught her gaze and warned across her mind.

As one of them leapt again, she was surprised into speaking. Her voice was hoarse and as if another's.

"Who are you?"

The question ripped from her throat, but it served as opposite as she had intended. A score across her leg, she saw, but shallow; she analyzed it quickly and dismissed it.

Once again, she could hear his breathing before he controlled it again. How many times had he fought? Enough to be deadly, but she was not experienced either and something about the way he moved was familiar, though seen in only frantic glimpses—

His eyes glittered and gave no answer. They were unrecognizable in the emotion or lack thereof that they held. Her gaze was torn away as something caught and ripped at her hair: the knife tore past, a strand of hair attached and glinting darkly for an impossibly long moment before the moments shortened again and her time was measured by not by heartbeats or seconds but footsteps and attack.

"Why do you fight me?"

This question, too, did not distract him, and the next knife nearly did not miss. Her heart lurched as her foot slipped downward in a step. In a flash, he sprang forward and there was now a cut across her arm, short and deep. Her eyes were not fixed on the blood, but on the knife: there, that handle…she had seen it before…

He seemed to falter. She tore her gaze away; this was deadly, this thinking; it had gotten her two wounds and near death in less than the space of a minute.

This time, she did not think about what she was asking, but on her actions, and then nearly stopped thinking about them.

"Why do you kill them?"

Bruise across his rib by the flat of her knife. His balance was altered minutely.

"Do you even know who I am?"

The fire was in back of him and gave him a corona of an outline but no features. She could not see his face…

"Why didn't you kill him?"

There. That faltering—that had been enough: she stepped, ran, and then leapt on top of him, hitting the ground hard and rolling, catching his wrist bone hard to keep him from stabbing at her.

"What?"

She was struggling with his wrist. His hand clawed open and shut, resisting like an epileptic's. His voice was sharp and dry, warm and emotionless, accented strangely differently than that of Evine or the people from Hellguard. A warning chord struck in her. She hoped to distract him and lean her weight hard enough against his wrist to break it so he could not kill her.

"You killed Rhian." She wasn't sure of that, but the sound Rhian had made afterwards… "You must know who she is, who all of them are, to try to kill them. But you did not kill the man, the doctor—he ran to help her—you would have killed—" His body's struggling was hard as turbulence and she was nearly shaking free; her hand was slipping. Resultingly, her sight came in pieces: arm, hand, knife, face—

That single moment of illumination, of the fire's risen light burning his expression of confusion into her eyes, and the shape of his jawbone, no, his forehead, no, his eyes—he was moving fast; the fire blocked his face from view again; direction had reversed completely and he held her arms down sharply, knife in tense hand as he opened his mouth to speak—

"I know who you are" was hurled from her mouth as something flung her away from the ground. She heard a sharp sound and turned as fast as she could though the ground reeled sickeningly and green tinged her darkening vision. She was not seeing, but rushing forward—a familiar man on the ground—blood, too much blood—Ruanek, no, Evine—none of them—She saw a cut across a man's arm, saw it was Tarek who had moved her desperately aside. She scrambled for her knife, ignoring the pain of another cut on her leg, gripped it, turned, then truly saw:

Tarek and the man…neither were moving. Both had eyes locked on each other's faces, the horror on Tarek's igniting T'Sei's memory. As the firelight had before, it showed cruel similarity. The other man had not stopped the ascent of his knife. T'Sei saw it jerk upwards and into Tarek's shoulder, veering away from his chest…he clutched the knife, jerked it out of his flesh. There was a sharp clattering as it fell to the ground.

"He is your father," she told Tarek, though he already knew. But Tarek's face was frozen. He seemed not to hear her. He looked towards Rhian's body prone in the shadows and then back at his father's face. T'Sei had seen that look, before, in a memory not her own…

She did not realize her forward footsteps until she saw the face of the man so unlike Tarek diagonally and much closer than it had been moments before, twisted into something unrecognizable but with the expression falling away…She tried to hold him down and hurl his knife away again, but her hands brushed against his temples and skull and thoughts jerked into her like an electric shock. The hatred was nauseating…

An entire planet, but with less people…adults, faces immobile, emotionless but for pain, and then children, dying, dead…so many…

She looked at Tarek but saw a boy twisted on the desert ground with his leg collapsed beneath him, two cuts on his forehead bleeding above his eyes. She turned back to his father and saw a man with a knife, and a man with a knife many years ago…and death…she couldn't stop herself from shuddering. His thoughts and her memories were too strong.

An inexorable force combined with exhaustion forced her eyelids to begin to shut; in her remaining sight, she moved Tarek's grip, hurled her knife downwards and downwards again into the assassin's body, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and hurled them both away…she saw green and horror and peace and then black.

Black and then stars.


	13. Part XIII: A Familiar Bar

T'Sei could not be sure of what she saw or remembered; most of it she could not see, for it happened around her. Perhaps some unguarded thread of mental contact pushed its way, smokelike, into her mind; she did know she was in some sort of physical contact with someone, if not who.

The stars flooded past. They blinked and swirled and stood still, then disappeared. In her mind, it was as if she stared at the brink of some great precipice and didn't know what was beyond, and that that precipice fell away in a soundless shattering of stone, leaving her, exhausted, at the end of a road already traveled by. The rest of her thoughts, when not punctuated by the occasional sharp, dreamlike image, seemed more physical than mental: the space in her head seemed closer, less expanded than it had before, the boundaries not shrunk in size but made more corporeal. When she did not see memories or thoughts now decipherable, instead she saw a calm then angry red deep behind her eyelids like an enigmatic sun rising over her future. She reached out a hand but it burned; she then felt nothing, only saw.

Another saw not T'Sei's mind but what was around him.

As the ship touched down on dusty ground surrounded by low, triangular grass, Tarek searched himself for feeling. For a moment, when his arms were not full, he looked down at his hand in the darkness of the ship's interior and the illumination of the controls and the strange, familiar sun and sky of this world in the Neutral Zone. Shadow lay across the inner edge of his arm and trailed along his wrist where it met with the soft bluish light of the writing across his viewscreen, nonetheless showing clearly the corded muscles and tendons of his arm. He felt as if it were dead to him—this small amount of feeling was a strange one, as it had been many years ago—feeling, shock, and then gradually a return to feeling again…he clenched his fist and then forgot about it, turning his head calmly to the side. Faint edges of light showed T'Sei's hunched, fallen form near him. He had freed his arms from supporting her body once, to guide the ship towards this planet by way of a route he had to search his memory for, and again, to land the ship once inside the planet's atmosphere. T'Sei didn't look to be in any danger from falling against any part of the ship; his coat lay under her. He gathered her across his arms again and blinked into the light of a world he hadn't seen in years. It had a bluish tinge to him, and the air was clean as he breathed it in: a different world than Romulus! It was a possibility he had never entirely thought of before.

_And from Hellguard._

_You've gone a long way. _

So it could be said about his niece. Tarek now had little to worry about, but it was not that thought that staggered him. How many times had he stood at a doorway and simply looked out, not from well-reasoned fear but wonder at what he saw? He could suddenly recall being very young, younger than he had remembered, and looking out to see what seemed a forest around him, one that surely was on Romulus…

He felt the heavy weight he carried now, the reality of T'Sei's near-stillness. He could not think about what had once been, not if it meant her life. And so, stepping from the sun-scorched metal of the ship that Evine had told him would take him to where whatever needed to be done could be cone, Tarek blinked for a moment in befuddlement at the horizon, the plant life, the buildings until an inner sense half-remembered directed him to a building just near the edge of the horizon and then down a wide street. When he at last reached a dark, practical house now overgrown with flat-leaved plants and tough, tiny flowers, he stopped. Stared upward for a moment, seeing the doorway and the windows in a different light, with only the beginnings of plants around it, when the other buildings were farther away. He cautiously told himself he was right, and with an overgrown confidence born from anxious necessity, reached forward to knock against the door, a difficult task, as T'Sei was shaking, and her too-warm forehead shocked against his arm as he moved.

The door opened to reveal lights inside and a dark-haired, large-eyed woman looking out at him. Her eyes trailed down to the near-V of T'Sei's shuddering body he supported with once-burned arms, and up to his drawn, tightly concerned face. Wordlessly she stepped aside to let him in, and as he entered, he noticed her face showed slight lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes: Tarek had briefly forgotten that Betazoids aged more rapidly than Vulcanoids.

They did not pause long; urgency bypassed that and made it a luxury.

"What?" the woman belatedly asked. Tarek could not assume she was being impatient; from what he remembered of her from many distant years before, he knew her to be the opposite. And there was a similar anxiety in her voice as was in Tarek's thoughts.

Tarek gestured with his somewhat free hand to T'Sei. "Do you know where your husband is?"

Her eyebrows rose minutely at that in surprise; she probably drew all the wrong conclusions. Thankfully, she said nothing revealing her thoughts.

She shook her head. A strand of wavy hair fell from the pinned-up rest of it, drawing Tarek's notice back to her features. It was then that Tarek noticed her expression was tight with stress and she seemed exhausted, though her voice had been deep and calm.

"I don't know where he is anymore." Regret shone in her eyes, and a surprising spark of defiance that amused Tarek slightly. What had Eric been up to over the past fifteen years?

"Livia, she's dyi—"

He realized her statement wasn't finished when she continued and interrupted his frantic interjection.

"I think I know where he may be, however."

It was the last refuge for Eric, for his tiny apartment he had found when he was a child was full of memories and the copper-metallic scent of blood seared against his nerves. Too near death, that man in the crash had been. Too alone, Eric had been when as a boy, he had run from the dark-haired girl his parents told him he was betrothed to, for fear of unconsciously hurting her with the thoughts of everything he had seen in the Neutral Zone that she would likely have run from, or which otherwise made no sense to any normal Betazoid. Something had drawn him there, before, to look into the dirty alleyway and wonder if he was free as the plants that grew spiny and foolhardy along the walls or trapped like the bird on the roof…and something now drew him away.

It was a sharp recognition that followed a moment's confusion as Tarek saw the dark-haired man in the bar. Tarek had searched with his eyes for a moment as Livia drew aside and away to stand by the doorway. The two distinct figures he could see near him, where Livia had directed, were both turned from him. The nearer man's hair was dark and ragged, his clothing worn. The twisting of his back to look where he was looking showed the man's tension. Farther, made more indistinct by the slight haze of the bar, a different man leaned his head against his arms in a light, weary sleep, his posture that of someone drained of all strength.

The man nearer to him turned, seeming to sense something, and held Tarek's gaze with dark, powerfully thoughtful eyes.

Eric was startled by the abruptness of this man's appearance; little emotions but an obvious turmoil alerted his appearance. The turmoil, however, was intriguing after the initial shock of it. It was like falling back into the thoughts he had sensed days before, of the woman whose course he had tried to avert from death. The moment he sensed it, though, was later than he would have thought, later because of concern. All Eric's strength had been given into helping the Romulan live. He had been wondering if the injured man would wake from the sleep he had lapsed into after the burns on his face were treated.

Eric turned and realized, as he turned, not only the abrupt presence but another, one he was so used to he had barely noticed it. Livia. The realization knocked his breath from him, briefly. Her thoughts were like pressure applied to a wound: unwelcome, sometimes, but that by which he could be saved. He looked at her eyes as she stood in the light of the blue-white sun, the tendrils of her hair that had escaped its confinement, and all sanity threatened to lose itself by clinging to her presence like a drowning man.

He tore his gaze away and saw the face of the man who now stood before him. Pointed ears; he must be Romulan, for no Vulcan held that kind of pain in their expression. That same bluish light that had illuminated, dazzlingly, his ex-wife made Eric think. The Romulan's face was sharp, his eyes high in his face and radiating worry, his mouth tight and wide. Younger, face different somewhat, scars more apparent…a boy, no, a man explaining something urgently…this man he had seen years before, nearly when all this mess started.

So that was the incredible significance Eric had felt like being punched in the stomach—not only the reappearance of Livia, who still shone in his peripheral thoughts sharply as a toothache.

"What is it?"

Eric had straightened in his seat fast as a gunshot in reaction to Livia's appearance, and struggled to maintain his balance as he stood. He still looked at the Romulan's face, trying to remember his name…but there had been so many…

The man only looked at him. Tarek, he was Tarek…thoughts still floated along the outer reaches of Eric's mind, uncaught, delayed memories of what sense the identification made in what was happening. Looked at him significantly—he had seen a look like that before—Tarek's thoughts had stilled somewhat and calmed, though they still held an irrational, frantic edge of fear like a child clinging to a knife, and something of his meaning became clear to Eric—he looked down from Tarek's face to what—who—he previously had not noticed.

The reaction of Eric's heartbeat was nearly audible this time. He grew entirely rigid for a moment, looking downwards, the face burning across his realization.

He had not expected to see her like this. Of her face, only one closed eye, upswept eyebrow, and her pain-tightened mouth were visible; her hair, great swaths of bandages, and one of Tarek's arms obscured the rest, but it was enough. Her entire cheekbone, on that side, was a livid scar that was beaded green around the edges, her face a drained grey-green, nearly colorless.

The Romulan—whatever he was to her, Eric did not know—shifted the woman to lie atop the table where spare tablecloths were heaped; Eric's arms were numb and rigid and would not move. Her head rolled sideways with little resistance, too pale against hair now green-dark with blood. Eric moved forward against the assault both presences were giving him: his ex-wife's—she had unconsciously put on the dress she wore before they had gone to Betazed to be married, years before—and that of the half-Vulcan woman. He peeled back her eyelid carefully—no response. Her eyes were still and then flickered somewhat beneath her eyelids. Inadvertently, in steadying himself, he put a hand to her arm and felt that she wasn't cold as he had expected but warm, and that her entire body shook.

"No," Eric said, more to himself than anyone else present. Tarek looked confused. "She has lost a lot of blood," he was telling Eric, but that was beside the point.

"Listen," he told Tarek in a low voice—the Romulan, of course, knew little of Vulcans. "I can't mind meld—"—years ago, unable to mind meld, only to try and understand a dying man's confused emotions and images of memories—"All I can do is use her inherent telepathic ability in contact with myself and hope it's enough to bring her out of it. She's gone into shock, and no wonder. The memories will help, the explanation of how this all began…"

Tarek was nodding; he had been able to do little more than stop T'Sei from bleeding, and so had gone to a planet he had been to in the past, when things had been easier and much harder to understand…

Eric left her side, crossed the area between the tables and the door swiftly, and, before she could even react to him, drew his arms around Livia's white-clad shoulders and kissed her deeply. The energy and intensity of their proximity nearly made him shake as T'Sei was. He hoped, sometime in the future, Livia would understand what had happened so many years ago and what had torn their marriage apart, but in the meantime, he hoped with even more of his will centered on it that she would understand mainly truth in his thoughts and his past.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, taking advantage of her bewildered silence but at the same time hoping, and crossed from the doorway again to the table where T'Sei lay dying. The wound on her face had reopened slightly; there was far too much blood already on the tablecloth beneath her.

_I will explain all later_, he had thought at Livia before moving again. _Nothing is as you think._

He did not notice the slight distance traveled by he and the doctor, both with arms encumbered by the injured. He let Tarek wait for the other Romulan to wake, then sat down in the corner of another room where he had once hidden as a boy, his fear and emotion almost palpable, swirling around him as the only other light as he held T'Sei's hand to his temple and fell into thoughts he had not remembered for fifteen years. He hoped she would not die. He hoped it was only shock, and that whatever else would not stop her from living. He hoped, but he did not know if hope was enough.


	14. Part XIV: Eric

Once again, T'Sei sensed vaguely physical contact and thoughts, but her eyes were unwilling to open. The images and memories were not ones she had seen before. She felt, now, no longer burning, but cold, until all cold receded.

_People she had seen before she fought, their faces younger, sharper with emotion—fear, in all of them. Though far from the desert and the past, a fear of death made them speak now, huddled in a wide room though nothing there threatened them. In all seriousness, they listed what little they knew of who remained, and struggled to remember memories Romulus had taken…_

_One had not returned. He bore no sign of injury, only clutched his head in silent pain. Better than an emptiness never filled in his eyes; some had died that way, after the memories were gone. Some knew no better…he, dying, went far from Romulus, to some unknown place._

_A man, looking at the hills and the grass and the wide sky, hardly believing this place existed, forgetting the frantic hope and fear that drove him here. From his face, as he turned, his burning eyes, she could see he was Tarek, years before. He spoke to a dark-haired man so recently a boy who was troubled by something a dying man had shown him. And the man's face, so calm in his pain even when he showed the boy, with urgent necessity, what had happened to all of them, and countless things before…_

_This same boy—shocked, he seemed more a boy than a man—clutching the edge of the doorway and leaning outwards, looking wildly to the horizon. He could not stop the man from dying. What use could he ever be as a doctor? He would not choose the path his parents had laid for him, but he knew similar things would always happen: he would feel the pain of someone as truly as if it was his own, and hope his basic training was enough. It was all he could have, away from his homeworld in defiance of his parents, drawn into thoughts and pain and others' love…so it had been with his wife…but he was not prepared for this. Not the traveling to Vulcan, but the knowledge, magnified by so many peoples' minds, that what would happen could fail and the ones he helped would be forever haunted by memories they could not recall…it shook him more than the cold realization that he could not tell his wife of this. She would go mad, trying to understand what even he was in pain from, though it had not happened to him…if he lied, she would live on happily, perhaps forget it had ever happened._

_But if he lied, everything between them could be cut off sharply as if it were death._

_Tall, red formations of rock stood far above them on a different world, Vulcan…Tarek looking with lost eyes, older, memory in his face. The setting sun burned outside a walled building, an open courtyard, where two women spoke, one grave, holding a staring, curly-haired child, one speaking, frantic worry transforming her features. The one who had spoken left, and Tarek, still confused by what had been returned to his mind by a Vulcan at Mount Seleya, saw her and could not look away. Rhian…_

Then the memories slipped and she saw a blinding progression of different memories, irrelevant: a dark-haired boy running from a shy, laughing girl down an alleyway, a man, in happiness, in pain, his past dizzyingly fast in her mind.

Everything receded, memories becoming emotions that pressed at her through the darkness and then swirled away. She became aware again that she was cold, but only in her fingers that had been so warm before. A heartbeat spiraled into her hearing. She struggled to opened her eyes, confused.

First came pain. The pain robbed her of breath but dulled; she was not dying. It remained sharp and tight across her right cheekbone and near her knee, and in various places along her arms, but slowly settled and allowed other senses.

She could smell…oldness, familiar. Paint and stone and water, and beyond, the vague particular smell of growing things. And more powerfully, a warm and living smell far closer to her. And tears…she had not known she could smell tears before; she had never encountered them on Vulcan, only on Earth, at Starfleet, and only once…like salt but cleaner, like rain but more alive.

The darkness cleared. Hazily, at first, until she realized it was only dimly illuminated in the room she was in and the darkness she saw was only shadow, contrasting with the wide band of bluish sunlight that streamed in from a window. Sensation beyond pain came to her in a slow, somewhat confused wave. She was not cold, but she sensed she had been warmer before. The pain was now unnoticeable but for a slight, dull ache. A low, continuous boom echoed in her ear, almost oceanic, and her entire side that did not face upwards was warmer than the rest, and rising and falling softly. T'Sei's brows drew together in confusion, but even that hurt. She decided to remain still, out of a pained weariness, except even then, the movement continued. She remembered being very young, but she was not; something else she tried hard to understand, instead—

A shadow fell across her face; instinctively, T'Sei looked upward. Everything made sense, but not quite everything. Asleep, breathing softly, was the man she had seen once before, who had nearly warned her that she might die…her head lay half on his warm, bare chest, half on his arm that reached down so that his hand rested against her forehead in a clumsily similar location to that of a meld. Blood rushed to her cheeks as only then she felt the pressure of his other hand against hers. She extricated it and shakily stood up, brief strength coming slowly to her. She heard in her head one of the ancient Vulcans telling the calm younger ones of the only time of illogic in a Vulcan's life. T'Sei's legs were bare. Her shirt had remained. The faint fire that had warmed her had now vanished with her shock. She stood, collecting her thoughts, for a single moment, before she crouched and a great, powerful anger took over her, leaving only confusion that held her rigid. With more force than she intended, she reached to the man's face and slapped him awake.

"Why?" she asked him when he awoke. She felt every bit of the tense anger that had shadowed her thoughts for most of her life. Anger that had not been her own but which now undeniably was. If she let herself feel anything else, she would not be able to return from it… It was odd, that he had barely reacted from the pain, only hurt and understanding showing bright through his eyes.

"You would have died," he began, voice deep and fixed with so many emotions she could not separate them. "By the time Tarek brought you to the Neutral Zone, knowing nothing of your condition but that I could explain more easily than he how your memories came to you, you were too far gone. Tarek had no idea; you were unconscious, but the wounds made you unable to fall into a meditative trance and additionally, you were in shock—"

He broke off, eyes pained, and gently moved himself away. He had pants on, T'Sei noticed.

_Good._

Though they seemed to be a recent addition; the front was in the back and the back in the front, he obviously hadn't realized.

"You have no idea how hard it was to be faced with the realization that Vulcan, Starfleet, _anyone_ could not be reached in time…" He trailed off. He was staring at his hands. T'Sei thought of a boy in this room, much younger, long ago, who had simply came to hide, to be alone…she breathed in and out, mastering her emotions for the single moment in her life, and, face immobile, searched his belongings for a pair of pants. There were several; she picked one, not caring which. It fit acceptably.

How soon it had been that so many had died, and now she felt the deepest pain as that of emotion, and something she hadn't exactly realized before.

He had turned while she changed. She walked past him.

Tarek wondered at the resistance of T'Sei's embrace; in the light of sunrise, she had walked to where he sat, her wounds healed, and wordlessly hugged him. He was briefly worried at the immobility of her face but attributed it to the events on Romulus. The shock aftereffects must be the foreign memories she had barely begun to understand.

Before the sun had risen entirely, she had found Tarek outside Eric's apartment and asked him, in a low quiet voice, for something within his medical stores. He had nodded; a while later, he found her outside Evine's ship looking faintly pale, her face hardened practically to the point of expressionlessness. The water was in the same place, she found. She had then closed her eyes and returned to the bar with the light of the sun. The entire time, she had not noticed who was beside Tarek, but in the light, it was unavoidable.

"Ruanek!" she exclaimed happily, face breaking into a fully Romulan grin that he returned somewhat wearily. His face had been heavily burned but was nearly healed, though still bandaged tightly across the forehead. Tarek tried not to think of similar wounds, though not burns, which had left scars across his own. He had spent the night and all his energy trying to heal the badly burned Romulan man enough so that he would awaken, and consequentially, Tarek was exhausted to the point of nearly being asleep on his feet. He did notice, however, the occasional silences in the low murmur of T'Sei and Ruanek's conversation; Ruanek seemed confused, T'Sei pensive. Overall, she seemed happier than she had, with Ruanek's appearance, but not…_right._

In an excuse for the energy he was about to use, Tarek inwardly promised himself he would let himself sleep soon. He stood up and drew T'Sei aside; Ruanek was sleeping lightly again, anyway. They left him where he was and Tarek led T'Sei outside to a corner of the building the bar was in, where they would not be overheard.

"What happened?" he asked her. From what little he knew of normal behavior, hers was far from it. T'Sei exhaled in a mixture of frustration and relief; his face held genuine concern. He was a doctor, after all, and she had always shown her emotions, just as he seemed, at this moment, perceptive as her mother. If you took away Tarek's past experiences, he and Saavik would probably be nearly the same…

"I don't entirely remember it myself…"

She looked downwards while she spoke, instead of into his eyes, until she thought the patch of gold-brown dirt beneath her feet would be burned across her retinas. It was easier that way, even if he understood, and so her words continued.

A short while later found them both sitting against the wall. T'Sei had fallen silent. She had begun analytically as a Vulcan, but it was not her way; short hints of emotion fell from her words forcefully, like angry fire, into the sky they both stared at.

Tarek thought that perhaps he would have rather not known that about Vulcans. Another part of him was vaguely curious about the Vulcan half of his ancestry he had never learned about, but he could not help but remain, in many ways, confused and oddly sad. And to combine that with what he didn't know about Vulcans, and T'Sei's own conflicting ancestral influences…! He could imagine that perhaps Vulcans forbade the taking of any life and had inherent cultural vehemence against doing so to an unborn, but he could imagine equally that they might discard it as illogical to let an unwanted life progress. T'Sei did not normally act Vulcan; so similar to her, he knew she could not. What emotional cost had she suffered…

But this was not what troubled T'Sei. She was still slightly in shock from so many recent events, this the least of them. More, she seemed to be in denial of anything following their return to this planet having happened, of having woken up to be told she had been in the arms of a stranger and remembering nothing of it, and then remembering all who had died, and that she would have been among that number…

"There is another in your thoughts. I cannot heal the mind."

What ran through T'Sei's mind, what she could not acknowledge, was that Eric had done her no true harm. And this conflicted with her entire life at Starfleet. She thought of Andrew and her fists clenched briefly in pain.

_Where are my beginnings? Everything has happened too fast._

Perhaps Tarek was more perceptive than she thought; he said simply, "You long to return home."

There was a sound from inside the building. Tarek recognized those footsteps; an instinct born of the propensity of those who had suffered to branch out and open themselves entirely to another person in one true bond made him turn his head quickly and grin without knowing at first why. His face almost spasmed into stillness in surprise as he saw who approached and became more defined in approaching.

"_Rhian_."

He rose, barely realizing his movements, aware that he was drawn to her as if she was the sun. Even though her flicker of a smile was weary and spoke, it seemed, of the barest escape from the black edges of the circling carrion of death. He looked for a single instant back at T'Sei, hair shadowing his face, eyes reaching some level of wordless gut understanding, then walked over to Rhian. Their two shadows mingled in the strong sunlight as he supported her, body instinctually stopping her from falling. They were silent; her face was drawn and her breathing shallow from near-death—but they needed no words. He closed his eyes and leaned his head forward until their foreheads touched. The cool shadows it made were unlike any he had encountered in Hellguard, or perhaps even on Romulus except for when night had fallen and he remembered the house at the edge of the city and both of their young sons, but mainly the look in her eyes that had fallen into a deep, indescribable part of himself from the far past—the same look as she had had when they were children and he forgot his pain, looking at her. The one that had passed between them, electric, on Vulcan fifteen years before now when, empty, she had stumbled from the adepts at Mount Seleya into the supporting arms of a man she had known only as an injured boy. Perhaps they would go to Vulcan, once everything was over. There were still things that needed to be accomplished.

They remained like that for an unspeakably long time. T'Sei withdrew from outside until she could no longer hear the murmur of their voices, and, sitting at an empty quadrant of barstools, brought her hands up to support her face and fell fast into a sort of healing trance, the lights blurring until they were no longer blue, and calm stealing swiftly over her.


	15. Part XV: Questions

In the morning, the aftermath of everything that had occurred had settled quietly to the bottom of T'Sei's thoughts and dissipated. She felt instead a weary momentum and a strange weight that stole over her every movement; it took great effort to move her face at times. She became aware that her cheek was almost indented from the imprint of the countertop, and pushed herself backwards with her hands, then rose. Relief coursed through her that no sparks or memories swam in front of her eyes, as they had in the unconscious space of time when she was still healing and when she was dreaming. She walked out of the bar, feeling oddly light. Tarek had left inside for outside a long while before. Against a haze of blue-tinged sunlight, he could be seen a little ways away from the ship speaking quietly to Rhian, who, it seemed, was falling asleep in his lap as he re-bandaged minor cuts on her face. T'Sei saw him fall silent as he realized this and hoist Rhian into his arms and into Evine's ship.

They would leave today. Tarek hadn't said, and T'Sei hadn't specified, whether they headed to Vulcan or the Federation. She hardly cared, in a sense; exhaustion had finally caught up with her and left her drained. Tarek was walking towards her now, actually; she realized it belatedly when he gently grabbed her arm and turned her back towards the entrance, likely because she couldn't or didn't want to move. And because as she turned, she stiffened and then froze for a single heartbeat. Eric's dark hair whipped around his face in the breeze; he stood in the incandescently-lit doorway to the unnamed bar, his entire body seeming torn between gravitating slowly towards Livia, who radiated a calm confusion a handspan away from him, and moving forward.

T'Sei nodded to Livia, genuinely grateful that she had directed her at least to where some of her memories could be decoded. She felt a presence beside her: Ruanek, blinking a little in the light, whispered in her ear in Romulan T'Sei now knew she understood, "I hardly remember who they are," and smiled ashamedly. Her slight inward laugh evaporated as her gaze shifted from Livia to beside her. Something like a halfhearted electric current in her mind had alerted her of Eric's presence and made it impossible for her to ignore the undercurrent of truthfulness and apology in his mind. She hoped this connection could be severed or perhaps forgotten in the momentum of things to come; not least of her reasons that it was an almost physical pain to have any presence in her mind after whatever was there had left her nearly senseless.

She merely lifted her hand, split-fingered, into his line of sight.

"Live long and prosper."

It was something she rarely said, had perhaps spoken once or twice in her childhood—to her father or grandfather, when asking the cultural significance. If her voice held little emotion at that moment, it was just as well; her emotions were not easily hidden and could also, now, overwhelm her mind. Like Tarek, however, it always showed in her face.

Eric smiled—she caught an unsettling glimpse of his expression as she turned quickly—and T'Sei glared minutely at him, calm threatened by an upswelling frustration. The seriousness, for Ruanek, had turned into hilarity he could not keep under control; he laughed outright as he and T'Sei walked towards Evine's ship, long blue-gold shadows preceding them and then wavering and dissipating into strong reflections against the metal hull of the ship. T'Sei searched her reflection for a moment with an odd weightlessness as if she had recently returned from her body after a long sleep or sickness. It was disorienting; she felt as if her slight age should fall away, that she was still on Vulcan, seeing strangers in their house speak to her parents—and yet, she had left that child behind—but not entirely grown. Another disorientation was the shadow of the urgency of Hellguard lifting away from her—she was exhausted, so let it part—and leaving her wearily content. Yet she searched her face—she felt, also, lost—not a child but with all her years strange, taken, guided, understood…

T'Sei broke away from the sight. She would try to understand it later.

Ruanek still laughed. "You're going to be very interesting when you get back," he said. She raised an eyebrow and smiled.

The same equanimity that had utterly taken over her and left her seemingly stone-calm in front of Eric had drained from her. As she and Ruanek stepped into Evine's ship, T'Sei was surprised to feel none of the déjà vu she had expected to find. No memories stared her in the face from the dented metal or Tarek's concentration. Any strength she had hung onto gave way for utter exhaustion that felt like blood rushing from her head and a sudden loosening grip on stable vision. She sat down hard beside Tarek at the controls, gaze rising from his illuminated fingers to his face. He stared at the blackness of space with a certain emptiness in his gaze that upon closer look was a mixture of pain and relief. T'Sei suddenly wondered how many times Tarek had left worlds more hospitable, more fitting than the one he now lived on, how many times he had wished never to leave. Abruptly she stopped thinking of herself—but it could not be driven entirely away; a rush of thought back to her head like a sudden, unexpected pressure gave the black spaces in between the stars a tightness like behind closed eyes. The memories of Eric's—and of Tarek's—she had seen in Eric's mind snapped abruptly into place. And something Evine had told her only three days previous…

Exhaustion still gave her the faintest edge of Vulcan calm. While she had thought, the glow from the controls had dimmed somewhat with the ship in warp and Tarek had vaulted away from his chair to finish redressing the wounds on Evine's face. The change in light was like a gap in her memory, sudden and unexpected. T'Sei blinked as Tarek walked back and the light changed again, creating soft half-illumination across their faces and arms. She was still somewhat getting used to being aware of what was happening in the present.

Silence gripped Tarek's features, reflected by the darkness of space. She laid a hand on his shoulder and his eyes broke out of thought, strange windows shutting and then resettling themselves. His cut-off withdrawal into the inner surfaces of his mind left him oddly perceptive; he seemed to register T'Sei's exhaustion and the cause for it. A slight downward cast of his brow and mouth: he had been too focused on T'Sei's silence to realize that everything affecting her mind had not stopped doing so, and that perhaps her exhaustion was due to it.

T'Sei's voice was low; Ruanek sat about 20 feet away, eyes unreadable and face exhausted yet optimistic, staring at the stars passing, but Rhian had finally fallen into a light sleep.

"The underlying memories and interference with my mind…I thought they had gone. It's getting harder to think or even to function; I've been able to move very little for the past few hours."

He had guessed this, she saw, and his expression clearly said he knew more.

"I'm guessing I'll be fine when we arrive. I cannot be sure. It's…overwhelming", she added.

As he responded, it took a moment for her to hear, for her exhaustion lost itself in what she had almost forgotten how oddly relieving his voice was; it had a cadence she had unconsciously affected when speaking Romulan, but more deeply than that, had unconscious hints of her mother's speaking.

It was not a relieving thing he told her.

"I've thought about this, but couldn't possibly know what would happen. I was uncertain of what had elapsed for most of the day in the Neutral Zone, and afterwards, and preoccupied…with the living and the dying." Something in his voice seemed to describe Ruanek, herself, Rhian, and even Eric suddenly paralleling their presences and then stopping as he continued.

"I had hoped there would be little or no consequence from the events of the past few days, but it seems the opposite, which unfortunately makes far more sense. The hope that you would even stay alive made me hope that nothing else could go wrong. It was what was needed for any possibility of change in the future or memory of the past."

T'Sei had a sudden moment of cold realization.

"You never told me all you knew about how I got this way. Even Eric knew things I didn't. Evine, that day I met you, said something about you knowing more than you said, that your unwillingness to say it was because lives were in the balance. That isn't _enough_ now. If I'm going to have any semblance of sanity in the days to come, I need this to stop."

He nodded. "I'll tell you." She wasn't suddenly afraid, as she might have been if he was to speak of the farther past that still troubled him, but felt that strange momentous anticipation she had known for so long in her life. And he knew why…

It was slower, hearing spoken words, instead of thoughts or memories. But what Tarek told her she saw not in his own memories, in flashes and pauses and meaning, but her own, with a strange significance lighting upon things she had not understood before.

It is the nature of things long held to one's self to spring forth easily, Tarek would have thought if he had had any other life than his own. And yet everything he wished would leave or become clear sometimes stayed…before he spoke, memories became apparent, floating to the surface of his mind like fleeting, significant reflections.

_The wind disguised Rhian's abdomen as flat until her clothing finally settled as they reached the house in the city where they lived temporarily. Tarek, a young man still, if he could ever be certain of his age, noted and dismissed the tight bundles of unpacked belongings with a sad recognition; he had none, but even objects they brought with them could never stay for long. Romulus had reduced them to nomads. He held a hand out to Rhian, which she gripped tightly—and felt nothing inside her mind, an unsettling nothing. As he spoke to her, diaphanous formations of thought began in Rhian's mind, lighting and then settling. Until what the adepts at Mount Seleya had taught him was lost to the physical reality of danger and his mind's protective measures of forgetting in survival, his mind would be hers. He fell into memories that she acknowledged, but he could not stop the faint worry that held him in his own body: how quickly could Rhian learn and become whole again before the homeworld became aware of their existence and their knowledge? And if she didn't, how could she ever raise a child? The possibility of death was still present, even after they had gone to Vulcan. It was dulled, muted, but kept Tarek awake at night, when his dreams did not return again and again to a man, features familiar, and a knife in his hand growing closer…_

_Tarek hoped impossibly that he might become a doctor, if not out of the necessity for there to be a doctor for those of Hellguard escaping Romulus' notice in order to live. There was too little time to study medicine. It had to be done at night, in the strange calm of the desert near where he lived temporarily, the numbers and names and meanings slipping out of his head tonight, for he had lost the quick memorization in exhaustion. _

_He awoke with other thoughts in his mind: Rhian's head pressed against his arm. He gradually remembered what had occurred…Rhian had found him drained of all energy, his head in his arms, outdated textbook on the dry ground. Her eyes reflected the moons. He had picked himself up, exhausted, his limp gradually growing worse until he was half-stumbling through the doorway. As he tried futilely in the darkness to continue reading—he knew he must—he stilled and clenched his teeth in remembered pain. He was still unable to heal a wound so old and significant. Rhian, now, had a strong recognition that she had seen Tarek before like this…but she did not understand. All language of that time was gone. Tarek realized her thoughts were not growing fainter, but his connection to them more difficult. He was losing the ability already…the adepts had been logically skeptical of the time Tarek would have, but it was falling short even of the Vulcans' estimates. Tarek decided he would not go work in the morning, but ground the medical knowledge hard into his mind. At the same time, he described it, although sadly, to Rhian, and her grasp of language grew. And yet it was his memory-dreams she saw with the fading connection that brought her memories and speech abruptly back. _

"Everything began for me on Hellguard," Tarek said. If he was oddly reflective, it was because his past still showed strongly behind his eyes. "I didn't remember anything else before until very recently…but that life on Romulus, when I was very young, was like a dream and it didn't protect me. It wasn't real, while all that I remember was born on the day I thought I would die."

In a difficult instant, T'Sei's mind was split briefly into hearing and something she had seen in one of the memories from Hellguard—

"That boy who whoever in my head thought had died was you." It wasn't a question.

Tarek unconsciously glanced down at his leg. "That's how my leg became like this. In running from my father, I injured it. Near-death and muscle atrophy. It's surprising I lived afterwards. I accepted it was difficult to walk; I had survived." He didn't stay on that topic for long.

"In the same sense that everything significant to now began for me there, everything was set in motion for you fifteen years ago, when you were six years old. It was then that Rhian and myself had gone to Vulcan in a desperate hope that the Vulcan abilities of the mind could preserve the thoughts the Romulan government took from the survivors of Hellguard, who were dying away.

"We first learned this was happening when a Betazoid man living in the Neutral Zone told the few remaining of us of a man who had gone to the Neutral Zone in search of a Vulcan to see his thoughts or what remained of them. I was prepared to steal a ship, hoping it would not be noticed, to travel to the Neutral Zone to speak with this man who had contacted us, for the information he gave was little; he sounded like he was in shock. I trusted few Romulans after they tortured Llai's mind. A trader stopped me before I entered the spaceport at Ki Baratan, and for some reason, I listened to her—likely why I'm still alive—and went in her ship to the Neutral Zone. Evine was defecting to escape Romulan assassins. I did not learn until after her death that my father was one of them."

_A Betazoid man…Eric. That's why Eric knew about Hellguard_, T'Sei realized.

_He told me so there would be a better chance I would survive._ Eric had seen too many die, through the images of the dying man's memory, and somehow had not been lost in despair but waiting for all those years to somehow keep Romulus' bastard children from being quietly exterminated.

"All Eric knew cohesively, after he got over the shock, was that we needed to go to Vulcan. It was beyond any of his expertise to preserve memories in any way. I went with Rhian in Evine's ship to Vulcan, with Eric piloting. Somehow it wasn't until after we arrived that I saw Rhian for the first time since I lay dying in the desert in Hellguard. She told me much later of what came to pass on Vulcan while I was at Mount Seleya.

"How does this relate to you, you might ask. It was what Rhian did on Vulcan that connected your life with ours. She happened, by chance, to find someone else she had not seen for many years—your mother. My half-sister. Saavik. Things did not go as Rhian hoped; Saavik was about to leave Vulcan on assignment with Starfleet, and so Rhian did not tell her that she could go to Romulus and help find the assassins. It was too much for one person to accomplish, she also realized. Along with her memories of Hellguard, Saavik has likely forgotten all of this: Rhian took you to Mount Seleya and gave you her own _katra_. It was after that that I met her for the second time."

T'Sei saw, again, what had been in Eric's unconscious mind: a familiar man—Tarek, much younger—standing in the heat of Vulcan's sun among the jagged rock formations that T'Sei now recognized as Mount Seleya, desperate thoughts across his face as a woman walked shakily down from the mountain and looked at him with confused recognition just before collapsing.

It hit her like a weight. Rhian. It was Rhian's memories in her mind. But why did some of the images seem so different, and not from Rhian's perspective?

"I remember them arguing," she told Tarek. "My mother and Rhian. I couldn't hear what they said, only knew it was of great importance and that Rhian was afraid. My mother was holding me and then she was not…"

But T'Sei recalled nothing of a _katra_ being added to her own. It made sense—it was likely true—but Rhian had not been in many of the memories, and the perspective was different…

"I don't think Rhian's thoughts were the only ones in my head."

Tarek spoke intently. "Everything that occurred after we returned to Romulus I cannot be certain of. Evine told me, when you were unconscious days ago, the memories you had _seen_ seemed completely different from Rhian's—these things hadn't happened to her. And Rhian saw me alive when I was younger. In the memory you had, it seemed like I was dead."

Something about Eric's thoughts suddenly made sense to T'Sei. She had seen only briefly his recognition of her when she had first seen him. He had thought she was—

"Rhian's _katra_ was mainly instincts, not memories," T'Sei said slowly. "There were very few of hers. But the images and memories I have seen from Hellguard aren't Rhian's; something must have gone wrong or changed fifteen years ago. They're my mother's."

Tarek was silent a moment, leaning his head against his hand. "Saavik," he said quietly. "Of course." He had never met his half-sister with the knowledge of who she was but could see something of her determination in T'Sei.

"Has she ever spoken of Hellguard?" he asked.

"Only once, far before that." T'Sei wasn't sure how far her memory went back, but she recalled hearing not of places her parents had traveled to or discovered, or places long gone, but something more terrible than that.

_"Tell me about when you found _sa-mekh_ was alive," T'Sei had asked, twisting her face to look into Saavik's silent, troubled one. Something had happened, some sort of change, before in that day; T'Sei had crawled through the house and met with no-one until she found Saavik in a meditative trance…and when her mother spoke, it was not in answering the toddler's request, but of something else T'Sei did not understand. There was no planet called Hellguard; Spock had let T'Sei look at a starmap in her curiosity—and nothing was there but Romulan planets around it…_

And when T'Sei had asked, in vague, unrealized curiosity, about the planet, she had been given no answers but a confused look…"She doesn't remember," she answered Tarek.

"Something else happened that wasn't expected," Tarek said. "You started behaving differently…or perhaps, when you were seven, your parents thought about you getting a bondmate, whether it happened or not, and a Vulcan encountered Rhian's katra in your mind…the transfer of which must have been incomplete, leaving you only with confusing impulses you ignored in your childhood. And Saavik, in investigating this oddity, unconsciously filled in the gaps in Rhian's katric memory with her own memories from the same time…I do not know what happened, only Rhian lived, when we returned to Romulus, and gained new memories and some of my own quickly. Perhaps they were still in her mind but she didn't accept them or understand them.

"Romulans, even half-Romulans, have, on some level, lost the art of any telepathic ability. The adepts at Mount Seleya somehow awoke my inherent—albeit weak—ability so that I could attempt to understand what the government had done to remove some of our memories. I didn't use it for this, for it lasted for a very short time, but helped Rhian in making her mind complete again so we both had better likelihoods of survival—Maiek would be born months later and I feared he would die when I was gone…eventually I remained in one place for long enough for the others from Hellguard to live nearby, and in my spare time studied what I could of medicine so I could heal those who the Romulan government did not favor. And fifteen years passed."

There was still something T'Sei did not understand, but not that she wasn't sure who she was anymore, with so much of herself being other peoples' minds. That she was just beginning to understand. "Why did it take fifteen years for this to happen?"

"I'm not sure—the danger grew more apparent, perhaps, or you grew more aware of this part of space, and memories and instincts began surfacing. But the main reason is that certain factions on Romulus would attempt a secret war with the Federation. The Academy—even Starfleet—from what little I know of it, is likely to be very different by the time we reach Earth."


	16. Part XVI: Andrew

Stars and the cool blue orb of Earth threw light and shadows far back beyond where T'Sei sat. Her hands were nearly steepled at her temple; she would think for a long while. The pressure her thoughts gave her had increased. Behind closed eyes, she hoped to regain some sort of calm, the overwhelming information settling. Instead, in flashes and points of heat and darkness and stars, she saw herself younger, then the world from her mother's eyes, saw Vulcan, the great bare heat of the Forge becoming more threatening and melting into the image of Hellguard, until T'Sei, in memory, was running. But even in her thoughts, she should not be running; she had already arrived. Everything had been answered…

T'Sei gradually grew rigid and paradoxically, her muscles loosened; her thoughts wandered. The light from the controls and from the stars was all there was for now; the lights inside of Evine's ship had dimmed. Tarek had supposed Ruanek reflected, perhaps sleeping, and hoped Rhian was sleeping; if there was anything she needed, it was deep, regenerative sleep. But he had walked back hours before, after staring at T'Sei for a single moment with no doors in his eyes, only windows.

Rhian was not asleep. Awake, she looked forward, eyes vaguely trailing the movement of the stars. He sat next to where she lay, feeling the weight of years as oddly familiar. There had been situations like this before, but none with the same calm that they held now. Tarek still couldn't quite believe that the danger was gone, the threat he had lived under for most of his life erased as if it had never existed. The past still gripped him and left edges of Hellguard everywhere. But those had been the formative years for all of them…how could you forget things you had done, things you had endured, if they had made you live? But he could forget, he could make meaningless any harm he had been born from. It was something that perhaps would happen in the future. The course of his life, not a threat, weighed little on his mind.

Of course Rhian had been awake.

She had drifted in and out of a focused unconsciousness that left her staring at a nebula, then stars, like she had never seen them before, as she had once seen faces. She looked now at Tarek, and her voice belied any lingering pain from still-healing wounds. Likewise, she did not move; she didn't know if she could. She was not in the least afraid of her physical condition. Everything was over, a frightening possibility but one necessary to life.

"I heard everything," she said to him quietly. Not a reprimand; no hint of guilt or betrayal weighed her voice—but an observation. A corner of his mouth turned up in rueful amusement.

"I know you had not forgotten," she continued, expending little energy through speech, facial muscles barely moving. No, the past had been in his mind for longer than fifteen years. He had grown skilled at hiding his concern, on focusing on many things at once while all he thought about was the frantic fear that he would be unable to save those who nearly died, and the stranger, fainter hope that lay offplanet: not all the memories could be taken.

"I can speak now," she didn't quite remind him. Perhaps he had forgotten, so caught in what had been nearly a lifetime ago for T'Sei. "Stop worrying." With what little energy not expended from lying still, she gave a little smile with the side of her face Tarek could see. Odd, how she could smile when in pain, Tarek had always thought. He was in awe of it on some level; his pain grew into his muscle and bone and was quietly forgotten or acknowledged, but never anything but serious.

He spoke of a more pressing issue than she had guessed.

"We won't be able to stay. We may be needed to explain T'Sei's actions and confirm what has happened. I'm not entirely certain the condition she was in two days ago has ended. We'll be redirected to Vulcan. But we have to make them believe the truth. We may not be on Earth long, but T'Sei has to have a chance. They'll look at it and see a murder, or not understand…"

Rhian wished very much she could sit up. At most, she mentally gathered strength despite everything. Her eyes held his.

"A few days at most."

She needed the healers on Vulcan, to say nothing of T'Sei. She had held on for this long with her _katra_…different, likely not missing entirely. But the years affected her with her mental integrity unable to retain its original strength. She was alive, but her body degraded more rapidly. It could hardly be seen in Vulcans, with their glacial pace of aging, but made even days difficult now. Rhian had almost died.

It was what they didn't say that they both felt most strongly, at this moment: whatever was ahead was no consequence. The relief was staggering; they no longer had to return to Romulus, and everything could change. Everything _had_ changed.

It was a strange surreality that accompanied T'Sei as she maneuvered Evine's ship through the great space doors and into the hangar she had departed from less than a month ago. There was no comment from Starfleet on the intercom; Evine's ship was not obviously Romulan, but still, T'Sei wondered at Starfleet's lack of notice. From what Tarek had said, they should have had greater difficulty entering…

She had to stop herself from automatically guiding Evine's ship to the shadows where T'Sei's much smaller craft had hidden far before it crashed in the Neutral Zone. Instead, T'Sei turned and landed near the other ships of this size usually were. The empty space their absence made created long shadows that dwarfed the not-quite-Romulan craft and settled like ages over T'Sei as the hard impact with the metal floor suddenly ground what she saw into reality.

She trailed her fingers over the smooth walls near the ship's door, feeling a pang of loss already, and walked, sharp steps unplanned and unsure until she settled as if rooted down. The hangar was bright compared to the insides of the dim ship. Unsure of how she felt, she turned back towards where she had exited. Ruanek had already emerged and walked down to join her. His face transformed rapidly from reflective to a sudden grin.

"I never thought I'd be inside part of the Federation…" He fell silent, T'Sei assumed in realization of the error in that statement, for Ruanek had been on Vulcan. She was slightly surprised to learn she was wrong. "It's probably not wise for Starfleet to know I'm here," Ruanek said, and darted back into Evine's ship.

_If so, then what of Tarek and Rhian?_ T'Sei wondered. They appeared beside her. Rhian showed no hint of impaired mobility. T'Sei was briefly caught in the flood of thoughts written on Tarek's face.

_He has some reason to be here._

Whatever it was was important. He risked as much as, if not more than, Ruanek with his very presence, as did Rhian.

Something pushed thoughts of them out of her mind. She sensed they were as two shadows behind her, and then the shadows of their presence dissolved completely from her notice. As she moved forward, she was struck more and more by a strong sense of _difference_ about the place. She half expected, however, for it to be weeks ago as she went into the hallway, for some lieutenant to stammer she was late for the Kobiyashi Maru…

The hallway was empty.

T'Sei was struck with a loss for what to do. She stood in the hallway…and her slight energy pushed her on until she stumbled into the brightness of the Medical area…Sickbay…an unusually loud murmur and bustle broke into her hearing after she entered. She paused in the doorway, unable to make sense of the sound and looking dazedly at indistinguishable, individual blurs of white. She couldn't catch individual faces, either; the cadets were moving too fast. It was when T'Sei suddenly couldn't move—the twinge of tightening muscles had been only slight stumbling, on the periphery of her thoughts, but now awakened fiercely—that her senses widened to include smell and the sharp scent of blood flooded into her awareness. She gripped the edge of the door and tried to turn, nauseated, but could no longer support herself and collapsed in a heap of protesting joints.

"What the he—" she heard.

At the edge of her vision, movement stilled and caught her gaze. A medical cadet had paused in handing a hypo to someone else. A thin arm dropped and shoulders turned. It was too briefly that the cadet's face faced hers for her to make out their features, but that single moment—

Some earlier part of T'Sei was struggling to see everything in the light she had when she had first arrived at Starfleet. To remember—but everything that had happened had so firmly ingrained recognition into her that she was already frozen.

There was the clattering of something falling, and the warmth of hands supporting her arms. She stared wide-eyed at the face above her, numbly unable to recognize the light making him almost ghost-pale, his paused eyes. The visceral recognition reverberated throughout her entire being; if she hadn't already been paralyzed, she would be. Andrew Naren, whose face blocked her vision. He was on medical autopilot, and didn't actually look at what he was doing, but in the moment it took for him to realize—

"_T'Sei._ Where the hell have you been?"

—it was a moment too late. All of her senses had rushed back into full awareness and mental contact screamed at her own. Andrew's thoughts, human, unguarded, overwhelmed her mind. A long, ongoing manifestation of her pain ripped from her throat, unheard as she fell into rejecting, protective unconsciousness, an unconsciousness that was not silent: unheard, her mind protested similarly until she could hear herself no more.

Andrew had at first not known what to think. He had not realized entirely who had entered Sickbay. When he saw, he saw a patient—_injured, female,_ he processed—something had made her collapse—until his eyes picked out details that fell into his shocked, realizing mind—as he moved blindly forward to pick her up, he saw a strand of hair fall past her ears—_Vulcan_—with the beginnings of recognition. Simultaneously, the analyzing, medical part of his mind saw the blood dried across a strand of hair and remaining on a corner of her face. As he moved her upwards so that she would stand, if she was more conscious than she was—her features, at least, made the recognition hit hard.

"T'Sei," he was saying…

_T'Sei._

If he hadn't noticed everything changed about her before he realized it was her, he would have assumed she had been on Vulcan all this time, or unseen for a long period of time for some reason—but everything changed left whatever part of his mind hadn't been helping in sickbay in shock. There were scars across her first three fingers, faintly raised—he had unwittingly grabbed her hands to support her before belatedly seeing she was Vulcanoid, and was surprised at the recent, raised lines. Her eyes, closing, were oddly focused from extreme fatigue, and a dark, healing gash showed stark green at the edge of her left eye. Her head fell back, and her labored breathing became apparent.

It wasn't even the scars. It was that she was entirely foreign, different—her body, collapsing again, had a strange fighting tension even though T'Sei was too weak to support it. It was the shock of her being alive and in Sickbay for some reason other than medical training.

And her hand that curled around the air, tense, as a hand would grasp a knife.

It was the side of her he didn't recognize that frightened him. He was no Vulcan to read another's thoughts, but her recent past was held strong in her eyes before they closed. Moments ago, he had first thought _Vulcan_, and then, peripherally sensing her scars and expression, _Romulan_, and then, _afraid—shocked—in pain—_

—_relieved?_

He had seen an injured fighter and automatically not assumed she was part of Starfleet, but that she was caught up in some aspect of what had threatened to be a war between the Federation and Romulus. And then it hit him how much he didn't know. T'Sei had been gone, dealing with perhaps far more grave issues than would ever threaten him. What he did not recognize of her was changed.

What he did recognize was T'Sei as she had been, as she still was—and with it, that she was injured, but not entirely physically. He had come across something he didn't entirely understand. There was a chance she would not live, and he would forever dream of the past and wish with all his might that he had averted it, had run down the hallway and stopped T'Sei from moving and thus continued her life.

Andrew ran a hand free of surgical gloves through his hair, which moved stiffly out of the way and stayed put oddly, likely from that sudden, brief fear-triggered perspiration. He hadn't washed for a day; sickbay was overrun with patients. They had all receded with Andrew's narrowing sight and focus. Where there were other patients, there was now only the dull background of his heartbeat and a dizzy, vague blur in his peripheral vision. He knew Stevens could finally handle the sight of blood and would help Jonson with the more serious medical procedures Andrew had been helping with the moment before. Even that knowledge receded somewhat, replaced by a blur of hallway.

Not a great distance later, Andrew arrived the part of Sickbay reserved for more critical conditions. He registered the room was lit and there was a bed empty of patients. He lowered T'Sei, then blinked: her arms were locked around his neck and he could not shake her grip free. He tried loosening her hands from each other—her head fell back, her eyes flickered behind her eyelids, her hand strength remained. A frantic noise escaped from him and was cut off, in coming into contact with her hands, her dangerously high heartrate became apparent.

There was a noise behind him; Andrew turned, eyes wide. He couldn't fathom his own behavior, only that it was…strange…

He had fully glared at the man who faced him before realizing who it was. Dr Leonard McCoy looked haggard and drained—too many hours treating critical patients and enduring long shuttle rides to and away from Earth because he would not have his component atoms scattered about, thank you very much—and vaguely curious. His concern was briefly masked by a sudden, unstoppable laugh.

"You should see yourself, boy. Shocked as if you'd injected yourself full of cordrazine. I'd say you've got yourself in a predicament."

"I think her mind's affecting me," Andrew murmured, then blinked again. "Sorry. What was that?"

McCoy waved the question away. "Never mind. Unimportant." His look of amusement fell away as he looked beyond the wide-eyed lieutenant and his green-stained medical uniform. "What on earth…?"

Andrew was shaking slightly; in a slow blur, he had moved aside somewhat and McCoy could see what had given the lieutenant so much shock.

Seeing a lot of green blood, "I thought the only Vulcan patients in Sickbay were cleared weeks ago," McCoy began to say, until his eyes focused beyond all the blood and zeroed in on the patient's expression. Definitely not Vulcan; unconsciously she was fighting pain, and no Vulcan ever _fought_ pain; they conquered it with logic. He wasn't aware of moving closer to get a better look. Behind the agonized expression and—a minor head wound had reopened and made her features more difficult to discern under a thin river of blood—she looked oddly familiar.

It hadn't been his choice to hold Spock's _katra_ so many years before. McCoy hadn't outwardly admitted it, but to have done anything less would have felt to him like killing Spock himself. He knew something of the Vulcan practices of the mind, medically speaking—and knew a _katra_ was a great part of what made up a person. Soul, it correlated roughly to. He hadn't expected to gain the memories of Spock's like a sudden downpour against which he had no resistance—in a sense, part of McCoy still was Spock, having been defenseless against Spock's mind while it was inside his own. A whole rush of images he shouldn't have remembered, out of privacy's sake, but hadn't known not to see years before in Spock's _katra_ gave him pause.

He was falling into stars, a dizzying, calculating view balancing his own. Heat—heat he was accustomed to—in these thoughts, he was not McCoy, but the faint residual memory of Spock's memory—and desert, but not Vulcan. Walking from a tent, under stars, with beneath Vulcan calm a faint sense of anger McCoy had learned not to be surprised at by now. _The crew of the _Symmetry_ had refused to let the children on Hellguard go to Vulcan. Long strings of logical thought crossed across Spock's mind as he sought with deep concentration to quell his anger, distracting him so that he did not notice until he abruptly came across sounds other than those his feet made, and a shadow against the night that was not his own. _

_She did not try to kill him this time, barely listened as he spoke of how she and the others could leave this place. She looked, though the stars barely hinted at it, as if she had been crying. He doubted it at the next second as she snatched the food he brought away and turned again to hide from what she likely perceived as a danger. _

_Tonight had been different; in the long moment created by the faint light from where the Vulcans argued and debated onwards, she had stood still. Her eyes held his in a clear battle between wariness, attack, and curiosity. The hand that held the knife was not tense—a weapon, at the moment, like an afterthought. Spock wondered briefly how different the Romulans really were from the Vulcans, for the offspring of both to remind him so strongly of—what?_

_Himself._

All the thoughts, patterns of thought, past experiences like ghostly reflections battling McCoy's own had been a lot to handle at once. For a brief instant, he had had a clear moment of realization about the same person, however—after Spock's_ fal tor pan. _

_Much of Spock's essence had been eased out of McCoy's mind, although, like a man in shock, he clung to a little of what was left. Feeling better, as morning spread slowly over Mount Seleya, somehow his mind went to Spock. White-robed, his dark hair between actual disarray and its usual state, Spock went slowly from each person he remembered hazily with an expression both usually Vulcan and puzzled as a newborn. He paused, in passing each, if minutely. McCoy's thoughts suddenly focused as he saw Spock look unseeing at the crew of the Enterprise, and expected for Spock to go onward when he stopped. McCoy couldn't see Spock's face, but he saw clearly Saavik look downwards and only up again as Spock passed._

What in hell, _McCoy wearily thought, rubbing his katra-abused head, until his eyes widened and he looked suspiciously at Spock. Spock had undergone rapid aging, but David and Saavik must have found Spock as a child. He couldn't have escaped—_

Oh god.

In the instant that had passed, McCoy nearly raised an eyebrow. So that's what Spock had been up to. He knew the patient he saw now definitely wasn't Saavik—her eyes were different, closer to Spock's, and her face bore other differences—it had just taken a moment for him to understand the impact of that.

He had heard something about another half-Vulcan enrolling in Starfleet but had thought nothing of it, had even seen T'Sei in the Academy but not known this. Why hadn't Spock said anything?

"Damn," McCoy swore, looking up. T'Sei's heartrate was elevating to anything but that of a normal Vulcanoid's.

"What?" Andrew asked from behind McCoy, still sounding a little dazed.

Just as simultaneously as knowledge of who this patient was had come to McCoy was the realization of what her condition was. Confusing, if anything. He had seen something similar to those levels before, once, on the Enterprise.

He also knew something of the other condition she was in, what caused the pain written clearly across her face.

"She's suffering from something Vulcan," McCoy told Andrew shortly, still unsure. "Not a mindmeld, but more serious. I think she's holding a _katra_. She's in something akin to a meditative trance right now."

He was only slightly dubious of the effectiveness of what he would administer to T'Sei, but not enough to wait for other judgement. T'Sei had far more serious short-term problems than a _katra_ in her head.

Andrew was next to him, so McCoy could clearly see him wincing. "I stopped her from falling—I hadn't guessed—"

McCoy picked up the boy's train of thought rapidly. "—and you forgot that Vulcans are touch telepaths. That happens to the best of us sometimes after too long hours. Harmless mistake. She's just in some sort of mental overload. I can't diagnose what's going on with her mind, but I'm guessing she collapsed from the combination of that and other injuries.

"Restricted movement in the limbs?," he asked.

Andew thought a minute and then nodded. He had already found Lexorin for the worst the _katra_ could have done. McCoy snatched it from him and administered the hypo. T'Sei's breathing seemed to ease somewhat, the pain falling away from her face. Andrew made a sharp pained sound; T'Sei's hand had been clenched tightly around his own and, unclenching, revealed bloodless finger-width areas of Andrew's burning hand that he now shook to restore the feeling to. McCoy bit back a chuckle.

_Kids these days._

McCoy found himself doing that weird Vulcan thing and looking down in slight embarrassment.

But Andrew was looking intently at T'Sei's life signs, noticing they were far from back to normal. His eyes narrowed in thought but not understanding.

"We should test her reflexes," McCoy said, and before Andrew asked, continued, "we can do that while she's unconscious. She won't wake up. Apparently her body still thinks the healing trance is necessary; she was in a lot of pain before."

Andrew nodded, rubbed his face in exhaustion, and settled down to more of a long day of medical work. But this time he couldn't act mechanically or efficiently—he did neither, normally, but—he was entirely on edge, physically and mentally, with the irrational fear of T'Sei dying, and more softly, the fear that whatever had happened would go unheard and Andrew would be stuck reliving the moments in his past when he could have stopped her from leaving.

He didn't realize he had said that out loud. McCoy was looking at him oddly, paused from reflex testing. Andrew had let McCoy do so, instead cleaning the blood from T'Sei's face and fixing her minor wounds.

"Leaving for where?"

Andrew answered with the only thing that made sense. "Romulus." And he knew very well they had nearly been at a war with Romulus.

He could see the older doctor's jaw had gone tight, his face briefly unmoving.

"So that's why you left from the main part of sickbay," he said quietly.

"And because you weren't there. But they would have guessed. And two more patients came in around when T'Sei did—Vulcan, but they didn't talk much—one with some similar problem to whatever T'Sei has. Sickbay has enough work to do." It was an understatement. Sickbay was crowded to the walls, and cadets were doing medical officers' work when the officers helped with the rest of Starfleet. Much as they healed, a lot were dying at the same time, and Andrew had to get away from the blood. It was the single time in his life blood had affected him; he had started to think of T'Sei, and the unbidden image came of her dead…

"They don't need to know about the reappearance of a cadet who had disappeared for who in hell knows why and who we think was somewhere in Romulus?"

"She's in no state to face them yet."

"You're right." McCoy looked oddly pensive. "She needs to go to Vulcan." He had finished with the reflex tests, and was nearly walking out, muttering, "Where's Spock when we need him"—but, of course, Starfleet had no idea of Spock's whereabouts, as he had disappeared himself—when Andrew's look of puzzlement registered within McCoy.

"She'll wake up in an hour or two," he told him simply, "when the Lexorin has taken effect." McCoy wore a look that clearly said 'I'll talk to you later, though you may regret it'.

He went off to find some officials who weren't busy patching up after the brief Romulan-Federation conflict and harangue them about finding mysteriously disappeared personnel, namely Spock and the crew of the Vulcan science vessel he had been on.

Andrew had little grip on his thoughts and the passing time until he realized he had set part of T'Sei's leg back into place—it had twisted a little when she fell—and that that was the end of anything he could heal.

He had settled into silence so well and quickly that time had passed without seeming like passing, in a strange, distorted, inevitable flow that left the present moment feeling like somewhere in the past and future at once. His thoughts were still difficult to put a name to. Smoothing a bandage over a minor cut—he had had to cut away some of the fabric of her pants near her foot to get at it—his hands fell away. He found he was looking at T'Sei's face. The brightness of Sickbay reflected off a shallow scar that slanted across her cheekbone. He remembered that not existing. Her eyes were shut tightly, but she seemed calmer than she had before. Her hand that had gripped his fell to the side of the Sickbay bed, facing upwards. Still wordless, his mind drifting somewhere between wakefulness and realization and concern, he sat at the side of another bed, picked up her hand in his, and tried to bridge the gap in his mind of the T'Sei in Sickbay with the T'Sei he had known before in his life.

Sometime later, McCoy walked back into the room, expecting Andrew to be setting broken bones or something with other patients. He saw the lieutenant had fallen asleep, his hand around T'Sei's.

The kid had to know what that meant. Bones had seen them around each other, friends at least, if friendship was that strange intense singularity that made them both seek out only each other. He was vaguely certain that Starfleet cadets these days were taught more about xenobiology—or whatever the word was—or perhaps T'Sei had shared with Andrew what similarities and differences there were between Vulcans and humans.

He guessed not. Andrew certainly didn't understand the cause for the ongoing strange readings on the monitor above T'Sei; he could tell that from the way Andrew had looked at the empty hypo of lexorin, as if it would have taken away the adrenaline and…the effects of pon farr. No, the lieutenant was unfortunately clueless.

T'Sei probably knew. Whatever in Spock's mind had been so perceptive and lingered a little in McCoy's pointed out the similarities between the look on T'Sei's face and others he had known. Spock had looked like that, after T'Pring rejected him and he nearly killed his captain. Saavik looked like that when she had spoken, only once to McCoy, and out of necessity, of Hellguard. Some harm had befallen T'Sei. McCoy guessed that she had acted…less Vulcan than perhaps she now would. Her expression, even now, was faintly guarded and unrevealing. Whatever had led her to Romulus hadn't been good, and she was still shaken from it.

She might or might not awaken before Andrew did. In any case, he should tell Andrew what he was in for. McCoy inwardly made a face: why was it always him who had to do these things? It was damned awkward but…it had to be done, he conceded to himself with a sigh.

Andrew blinked once or twice before extricating T'Sei's hand from his. He hadn't noticed he had been asleep, and his dreams had been unsettlingly real, dark and frightening and too fast to follow. He felt, in some peripheral, instinctual part of his mind, like he was still running from something, but the thought dissipated into the dimmed brightness of Sickbay. McCoy was standing near him, multiple unnamable expressions fighting for dominance over his face. He drew Andrew aside until they stood near the hallway, shadowed by a computer monitor and out of earshot of T'Sei in case her sleep was lighter than Andrew thought.

Andrew looked at McCoy expectantly, puzzled. What the man was saying must be something of importance, or he would have spoken of it before.

"Son, have you heard of the order on most Starfleet ships that concerns giving Vulcans priority passage to their home planet every once in a while?"

"I don't know why…" He trailed off. What McCoy was saying must have something to do with T'Sei. He just didn't know what it was.

"T'Sei isn't only suffering from a _katra_ inside her head. You were wondering why her readings stayed off the chart in most respects even after everything else was treated. T'Sei likely had good reason—"—and lack of time—"—for not having told you; something across the Neutral Zone beat her up pretty bad, besides whatever turmoil her mind must be in right now. Or she may not have realized or thought it was over—"

McCoy paused in speech for a moment, overwhelmed. Spock and Saavik hadn't had quite the expression T'Sei did. Or rather, they hadn't at the time he had remembered before. This was like at the _fal tor pan_, but different, defensive—T'Sei hadn't just been in some violent scrape. She was possibly in denial that pon farr had even occurred; it looked like it had messed her up pretty badly. And that fit; some small part of T'Sei's state could be explained by something known pretty much universally as the 'morning after pill'.

_Jesus Christ on a bicycle._

He continued after a minute. "She's also showing symptoms of the aftereffects of pon farr."

Andrew's knuckles tightened reflexively. "Is she going to die?"

So he had heard of it after all. It just hadn't connected.

"She's overcome the worst. You might not want to ask about that. Whatever shock she was in wasn't entirely from the _katra_."

The information seemed to settle within Andrew more visibly than it had before. He drew back, anger and pain and fearful concern flashing in his eyes, fists clenched until he quieted himself and asked gravely, "She was raped?"

McCoy grew serious. He hadn't considered that.

"I don't know. It's unlikely. She would have fought the _plak tow_ away and been here with only too much going on in her head. Whatever happened, she wasn't expecting, or she would have known she had pon farr. Most Vulcans do. I can't imagine that Spock would let her go uninformed about something that nearly killed him on multiple occasions." Bones had to restrain himself from laughing at that memory. Spock had acted so humanly illogical…

But the present was more serious.

"Andrew, you have to be prepared to deal with whatever happened. If she goes to Vulcan and you…help…she may well never want to see you again. But she didn't run from you instead of collapse.

"You may also be getting into a relationship more serious than you would accept at first. T'Sei's probably temporarily acting more Vulcan until she gets things under control. The Vulcan attitude for relationships…not including arranged marriages, which is not the case here…is bonding, once and for life. Exceptions are made, and some Vulcans act differently, but it's a deep part of their nature and even I've seen the way you two look at each other."

Andrew hadn't entirely heard him; he had looked back towards T'Sei while McCoy was talking. He heard what McCoy had said. The part of his mind that had grown dead serious settled into thought but was overtaken by what may have been T'Sei's thoughts in Andrew's dreams, and the knowledge that had struck him and left him rooted to the earth the day T'Sei, acting entirely the opposite of Vulcan, had mistaken him for someone else—the day they had met and Andrew was struck down for a second by the weight of realization, gravitating towards her and she towards him already.

He had known. He had known back then, even that far back that whatever happened between them would be more serious than perhaps could ever be described. It had made words strangely difficult and easy between them.

The light in Andrew's eyes reminded McCoy—and the traces of Spock in McCoy's mind—of the fleeting, eternal understanding that bound Vulcans and logic together. He didn't need to speak and tell McCoy what was so plainly written on his face. Bones could see painfully clearly their future—on Vulcan, perhaps—that Andrew would go through hardship, perhaps die for her, resolutely and steadfastly, such was the nature of what was unsaid. The logic of that illogic made McCoy simply nod.

He remembered when he had been on Vulcan, had seen briefly through Spock's _katra_ returning. Andrew looked as if he had discovered another world.


	17. Part XVII: Memories

T'Sei became aware first of warmth and pressure. She lay full-length against something, on her side, the heat of the room strangely comforting. Her thoughts drifted with her awareness that realized there was a faint pressure on her fingers: from there the warmth originated. She sighed soundlessly, feeling some of the heat that had overwhelmed her before abate.

The mental image of where she was—she had not seen the room around her, had last had her eyes open in Sickbay before Andrew's thoughts in addition to Rhian's _katra_ brought her into a defensive healing trance—was not something seen with her eyes, but a vague idea that nearly had physical form. _Sickbay-but-not._ It wasn't the main part of Sickbay. And she was not alone. As she became aware, eyes closed, of the general idea of her surroundings, she was surprised to see that within was her own face as she lay sleeping. A faint warmth and pleasant wash of thoughts made an insubstantial string leading away from her mind: she followed it and came into contact with—Andrew.

She was relieved but oddly sad that the edges of her knowledge of the _katra_ were gone, that she could be in contact with Andrew's mind without pain. Rhian's _katra_ was insubstantial against Andrew's mind, unnoticeable. Analytical thought came slowly. T'Sei remembered some of her own medical training. It was probably Lexorin that made contact with another tolerable and the _katra_ less noticeable.

Sad that she was aware of Andrew defenseless. She couldn't see, but rather sensed, his closed eyes and the dizzying rush of thoughts. They were different, human, but oddly invigorating. But knowing so much about him was nearly what gave her sadness. His pain and hers were difficult to separate. She stepped into the tingling flood like electricity. His human thoughts were like another language, slower but in some ways more logical, strangely easy to understand—

She didn't see what he saw like she had with Rhian or her mother. She saw presences, ideas, thoughts in physical form—

Cold-pain-strength. Andrew, younger, clinging to the limb of a tree as the river tore at him until he was nearly senseless. T'Sei reached forward automatically as if to grab him away but stepped back as his sightlessness cleared, the water less fierce, a hazy sun visible above it. A hand grabbed him and hauled him into daylight; his father laughed. Andrew still hadn't learned to swim.

A knot of sadness gave briefer, more intense bursts of memory, mainly a feeling like a hole ripped out of him which made T'Sei stiffen and hold her breath. His mother when he was younger—blur of a face from a toddler's vantage point—face drawn, nearly motionless—Andrew drawn to her as she lay dying at midnight, he not wanting to sleep, padding with pajama-covered feet down the stairs so cold through the thin fabric. Something other than cold made him shiver, and the moonlight no longer felt comforting. He asked his mother something in a small voice, and she told him a long story until the night spun out and she said to her son something meaningless he didn't understand. He remembered her hand against his face, the strength falling away. He thought of her when he looked at the still river outside the next day. The clouds had paused in the sky.

T'Sei had nearly guessed what had happened when Andrew was younger; on a single occasion in speaking to her he had fallen silent, and she had nearly known why. He did not speak of it; he was healed, in a sense; he had been too young for deep emotional pain to rip him apart.

She forgot she only observed and in the memory-reality stepped silently into the room—she had bandages she didn't remember getting and wore a Starfleet-issue shirt and pants—and drew her arms around the little boy. _Who are you?_ he asked silently. _Your friend_, she told him, thinking of how that had changed, had always been changed.

Andrew shifted in sleep and breathed out. He was somewhere in the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, dreams and memory.

The little boy dissipated, the room changing. T'Sei was standing in a small room she recognized as similar to her own a few years back. The shirt Andrew put on was that of a first-year cadet. He yawned and looked outdoors, blissfully still half-asleep but waking quickly. Lists of medicine and medical knowledge meandered around his head, given form by Andrew's memory. He paused to glance at a mirror before walking out of the room—Andrew _was_ younger, younger than when she had met him. It looked like he was checking for circles under his eyes. Crossing the grass near the perimeter of the Academy, he yawned again and then stiffened, the world around him sliding and collapsing from his perspective. His forehead was beaded with sweat and he shook, even when he was found and brought back to his room. Textbooks were cleared off his bed to the floor. Someone had stacked them. T'Sei turned away, struck by the open vulnerability of the fevered cadet, as if to give him privacy, but she found she sat by his bedside and drifted with him into sleep.

The sudden wakefulness he gained a day later, the energy barely enough for him to come in late but with a paper on immunology, specifically whatever had struck him ill the day of the finals, was only a vague memory, not as important.

The younger Andrew straightened from fevered sleep, reached out and gripped T'Sei's hand with his vaguely insubstantial one.

"I want to die," he told her fervently.

She tried to look into his thoughts. This was something Andrew had never thought, had never said, not even when he had a fever.

"No, you don't."

"I want to die rather than—" The hand melted away, though the frantic feeling lingered. Everything moved laterally, and T'Sei's perspective changed. She was looking through her own eyes in a night-darkened room she recognized. Andrew stood near the periphery of the room. He had one surgical glove falling off his hand. Green blood stained his uniform. He seemed out of place.

"I want to die," he insisted, "rather than…"

T'Sei's eyebrows snapped down in thought. She felt more than she should in Andrew's memories. She looked up, but didn't see him, rather the wrong face close to hers, dark hair, dark eyes. Her hand bruised someone else's. She didn't understand. She was cold except where her body connected with Eric's, and briefly could not think or separate their minds. Time passed in an instant: she stood, cold, no longer burning, and saw peripherally the sun rising. Her arms crossed over her chest and her icy fingers dug into her shoulders. She could not separate the dark eyes from the gray. He had saved her life, but—

"No." The words were her own, not Andrew's. She had spoken them when Eric was asleep, when she had thought the pon farr was gone.

She looked up, and saw Andrew's mental face. He stood a few feet away from her, and didn't move closer. She wore what she had worn when she had seen his memory where he had been a child. The blood had disappeared from his uniform, the glove fallen completely away from his hand. His hands were empty. He straightened as if some great weight had fallen away from him, but some shock faintly lingered on the edge of his expression. He hadn't expected to see her own memories.

T'Sei knew Andrew was closer to waking than he had been.

She walked towards him—he didn't shrink back into a child as she had expected—and they simply looked at each other. Andrew brushed a finger across her cheek; as an afterthought, the bandage there fell away and dissipated. Her minor wounds had healed. She looked into his eyes, feeling the deep, powerful hold of the memories beneath.

All fell away, Andrew disappearing last without regret for staying or leaving. T'Sei was far from Andrew's mind, which remained strongly connected to hers. She felt she lay sleeping. The stream of thought swirled away at a point of contact: T'Sei became sharply aware of Andrew's hand against her own. Her eyes opened, darkness and light and images coalescing into sight. She was looking at Andrew's face; his head lay back against the empty patient bed beside hers. There was a sweetness in him that hadn't disappeared in sleep, only grown deeper, more thoughtful. His eyes opened. He didn't move, only looked at her and thought, his thoughts and a sudden heat palpable from where their hands touched.

His thoughts were oddly cautious, from what she could sense of them—oh. He understood. What had happened, what would happen. She sat up, heart beating fast and light, and eyes on his, moved her first two fingers against his own. The heat was unbearable, pushing the air out of her lungs. She needed—

He didn't understand. As if in answer to a question within his mind, she gently broke her hand free and as he neared until next to her, leaned forward and rested her hands near his shoulders and then the back of his head. He didn't understand how intolerable the sensation was; she burned, but it was not only that. She closed the distance and stole his breath and he her desire, her lips against his, the fire in them both merging and becoming indistinguishable. All the while, in some half-forgotten part of their minds, T'Sei held a little boy from his fears and Andrew looked at her across a darkened room in silent understanding.


	18. Part XVIII: Double Vision

Drew left the critical part of Sickbay like exiting from vast warmth to shocking cold: the cool unobtrusiveness of the hallway soothed against his mind yet, strangely, frustrated him.

He was exhausted. T'Sei had fallen back into a light sleep punctuated by occasional limb stiffness or rapid eye movements, her heartrate somewhat closer to normal. The course of the pon farr was only in the beginning of the end, very slightly abated—consequentially, Andrew would be unavailable to Sickbay for at least the next couple of days—but whatever Andrew knew about pon farr was not what was occurring. The blood fever in T'Sei battled with the _katra_'s hold over her mind and left her at turns demanding or exhausted. Only minutes after she had kissed him, she had fallen back into deep unconsciousness.

Drew had looked, somewhat stunned, at the sleeping T'Sei and exited Sickbay.

He let the cool air wash over him. It was getting easier to think, but his mind was overlaid with weariness and the strange sensation duality, of another's mind having shadowed his own, that gave everything he saw a dual sight and group of memories tinged with foreign ways of thinking—T'Sei was certainly, in many ways, different from him. Even thought she didn't act Vulcan, her mind was partly formed that way, and even her illogic or morals were tinged with some neither Romulan or human sense and reasoning. He had to collect his thoughts. It was just…difficult. He looked at the twinned Starfleet insignia on the wall, perplexed. There should be only one, he thought at the back of his mind. He let the colors become formless for a moment. One of the insignias had an odd blue cast to the edges, one was sharper than the other.

Andrew breathed out, forgetting what he was looking at; he slid down the wall until he sat, thinking of breathing and heartrate. His breaths were slow and long, but not in any critical way. His heart had sped indistinguishably. He felt feverish and clear-headed at once, but the basic, human, thinking part of him knew he was exhausted. He looked with unfocused eyes at the wall, clutched at the bundle of fabric—his shirt—in his hand—and walked slowly through the dual, hazy and clear hallway. The steps he knew by heart or with closed eyes; the way to main Sickbay was almost unconscious, he had been there so many times. He was relieved that experience could guide him while he thought, or tried to think.

There was less blood in main Sickbay than there had been before; time had passed. Or rather, there was less green and less red that Andrew saw. Movement caught his unsure sight—the twin vision had left him—and he saw some minor sutures being made. Andrew's brow furrowed. He had been prepared to leave main Sickbay, but something about the man who was doing the sutures—

His clearer sight focused on a Vulcan, or someone he presumed to be Vulcan.

Tarek looked up from finishing the almost instantaneous sutures that for most of his life he had not had the technology to accomplish. His aid in Starfleet's main Sickbay had gone by calmly, his actual identity of Romulan—_or half-Romulan_; his father had never told him—unknown. Rhian had been told to rest for the more serious internal injuries—a pang of regret shocked through Tarek; he should have arrived sooner, or gone to Vulcan; the missing katra weakened Rhian and would not let her heal entirely, something beyond the knowledge of Starfleet—and she watched him while she lay hopefully healing.

A white-blond young man, half-naked, clutched one arm to the doorframe in exhaustion. His gray eyes were dazed; his mouth was slightly open as he breathed as if to escape heat. The hand not attached to the door and stopping it from closing held a white Medical shirt. A vague recollection came to Tarek of one of the children on Hellguard with a similar expression against the haze of heat clouding everything, having just crossed a wide stretch of desert to find nothing but exhaustion or harm.

Tarek put away the equipment he had been using into its various drawers, then crossed over to him.

"Do you require the services of Sickbay? …Are you looking for someone?"

The young man blinked, still looking lost, then his eyes seemed to focus.

"I don't need…sleep yet. There's someone I needed to find. I don't know who."

He further focused and saw Tarek, and seemed to pause. The Vulcan…no, he must not be Vulcan…looked in some ways similar to T'Sei. Behind everything, memories similar to the ones that weren't T'Sei's burned eternally behind his eyes, however forgotten or muted. And…he looked like…

Drew straightened unconsciously and, remembering he held a shirt, put it on almost as an afterthought, while thinking.

"You came with T'Sei, didn't you?" he asked over his shoulder as he found some water and splashed it over his face.

It was T'Sei's features that were slightly like the Romulan's. Andrew could think enough to group them together—and to understand that the woman looking in his direction must also be Romulan…or something like that. "And you did too," he added. "From Romulus." The words came slowly.

Somehow he got it across that T'Sei was in the other part of Sickbay and just slightly improved from critical condition. He made it down the hallway until he reached the Starfleet insignia again, and, frowning, Andrew turned towards the Romulan to realize his sight was growing dim, his eyelids closing.

Tarek had to support Andrew as they went into the room where T'Sei was. He spent the next few hours looking at her life signs, knowing Rhian was nearby and recovering, and coming up with the conclusion that whatever his niece had while in the Neutral Zone had not gone away.

McCoy was checking in a while later, having deemed that enough time had passed for him not to walk in on anything embarrassing, and met with a unexpected visitor.

McCoy looked at him a moment then stated, "You're a damned sight too much like T'Sei to possibly be Vulcan. Which means you're Romulan, and there's some serious reason for you being here.

"Uh-oh," he continued, as Tarek opened his mouth to speak. "This is going to be a long story."

Tarek gave a tired half-smile and, well into the morning, told McCoy things he had known very little of before and things he had only expected, and then things he had just plain never guessed, about what Tarek knew of the past week or so, and knowledge from far before.

Bones had to close his eyes for a moment. An odd part of himself understood what Tarek was saying, and made him silent in his realization of the scope of events he had known the bare end of nothing about.

His heart went out to the man: McCoy couldn't imagine being forced to live on a planet of people who sought to kill you after creating you in the first place from rape, then hiding, unable to learn enough of medicine to save the few survivors of Hellguard who had died, some of whom you hated, had nearly killed or been killed by, but knew you had to save…and then coming to the Federation, which, McCoy admitted, wasn't the most open and welcoming place and could also lead to death, to accept you couldn't stay long and to go to Vulcan with only a faint hope of Vulcan morality giving you the possibility of safe haven.

McCoy hadn't looked at the Federation from the perspective of someone Starfleet could label 'enemy' before. It made him feel odd.

With a strange conviction he assured Tarek that he had gotten out of scrapes worse than this, and the Academy could be convinced even if it seemed impossible. Bones couldn't let T'Sei die because of indecision on Starfleet's part. They just didn't know the full story…

"Listen," he told Tarek. "You can't tell Starfleet about Hellguard. They know a little, which is enough. It's something that could do damage to the Vulcans and the Romulans equally. What T'Sei has done is enough to tell them. In a very small way, it might have been what averted the conflict we just had with the Romulans from becoming a full-scale war." The thought was dizzying: if that assassin had not died, if he had quietly killed all who remained of the unwanted offspring of the Romulans and Vulcans, if Evine had not killed another killer…McCoy saw briefly through the eyes of the Romulan—

_An odd thought_. One he had tried not to experience much in the past, unsuccessfully so with Ruanek.

—the one Evine had killed could have hidden among the Senators, killed one of them, perhaps the Praetor, perhaps…

Many other things somewhat outside of McCoy's knowledge of Romulan politics. He knew, though, that what T'Sei had done had upset the balance of whatever the Romulans had been planning.

It was oddly relieving that the Academy decided not to call a full trial of the confusing sequence of events. For one, T'Sei couldn't stand, at the moment, despite the single injection of Lexorin McCoy had dared to give to her in her condition. And Starfleet was gravely aware of the seriousness of anything concerning the Romulans, and the adverse affects of anything public being done about something the Academy admitted to not having enough knowledge about. They remembered enough about McCoy's past katra experience to know that T'Sei's actions could not be accountable to entirely her own judgement; she had been acting on someone else's impulses. Tarek had stayed curiously silent, thinking of Rhian, eyes reflecting the light in the room, face almost Vulcan, unrevealing. He said little, but when he spoke, gave the bare details of the man who T'Sei had killed. His father. It ran behind Tarek's eyes and in McCoy's thoughts. The various members of Starfleet seemed to notice the cast of Tarek's body, the weight supported on one foot, the scars on his brow that he had clearly not inflicted.

"I speak not from judgment but from the moral need of past events to be heard. As a doctor, and as myself, I try to stay free from bias in this account…it is not of my volition not to reveal the reasons behind a _katra_ being given to T'Sei fifteen years ago. I would violate Vulcan privacy to tell of it, and alert the people who tried to kill me of my existence, and Starfleet of something the Vulcans have deemed classified to preserve their lives and ours. It is not my knowledge to tell. There will be no specific event giving this account a name and a date, and no name for the man who is now dead.

"What I can say is that if T'Sei had not been found to give the _katra_ to, thirty-three citizens of Romulus by the planet's default not desire would have quietly been killed and their existence forgotten. They and I were part of a failed experiment I cannot name and the knowledge of which has been taken from me. I would not be here to someday prevent similar experiments from ever happening. It's not an easy thing for the Federation to accept a treaty with Romulus, or for Romulus ever to agree to it. It may happen, if both wish to avoid anything like this ever happening again.

"I don't know very much about _katras_, only that they are not an easy thing to give while holding on to your life. Dr McCoy has told me the human equivalent is something called a soul, but it's probably more than that. It contains memories and instincts and vital knowledge. The one who gave theirs nearly died afterwards. But it was better than being killed or having memories taken. Of the eleven who suffered severe physical reactions from loss of memory and mental torture, only one I could help live for long enough to pass on the what little we knew that could reveal the possible identity of the assassin, and died a day later. There are only eight of the rest of the thirty-three survivors of the experiment who remain alive.

"The assassin killed most of those who died. He also killed a boy who was my son in all but blood, and nearly killed his own—" Tarek broke off from a word in Romulan.

"Granddaughter," McCoy supplied in approximate translation.

"—after I stopped him, which resulted in his attempts to kill me. He tried many times to kill me before, including when I had last seen him, and he gave me two massive cuts across my forehead. He was one of the primary instigators of the failed experiment. Suffice it to say, he took many lives, though he created many as well. All but two of his progeny are dead, as well as numerous Vulcans. I did not know his plans, nor did I know his identity. Though unseen, he was a key point in the beginning war between you and Romulus. I did not learn of this until after he was dead. His identity I carry in my blood; his faults remain.

"Though I cannot speak of it, I hope you understand the imperative that began what T'Sei concluded and helped accomplish. Perhaps when there is agreement on both sides of the Neutral Zone to never do what has been done, I will be able to speak of what my homeworld has begun to atone for in not repeating."

There was a long silence as they realized Tarek's speaking was over. McCoy thought of all the Romulan had left unsaid, wondered if he would ever hear everything. It was probably something he physically, mentally, and morally wasn't ready to hear, beyond what he had already heard from Tarek before they pleaded T'Sei's innocence. He looked at everyone else in the room. Some didn't seem to guess too far from the events Tarek had tried not to describe. Many seemed stuck in that unenviable position between agreement and problems. There had nearly been a war with Romulus…

…which T'Sei had averted.

T'Sei was sleeping an awful lot. McCoy cleared his throat. It came out loud as a gunshot in the silence; he had everyone's attention.

"May I remind you that T'Sei, Tarek's patient if I'm staying at the Academy to deal with all this mess, is in critical condition and will likely die if she doesn't get to Vulcan pretty darned soon?"

It took a while, but the four officials who had heard the case in the tiny conference room agreed hurriedly and granted T'Sei extended medical leave on Vulcan, and Medical Cadet Andrew Naren accompanying leave. They would resume their studies at minimum of two months later, with the option of doing so from Vulcan if a longer recovery was necessary for T'Sei. And T'Sei would not be piloting any ships for a long while.

McCoy chuckled, then hurried to Sickbay. They would leave as soon as a small ship was assigned to take them there.

"I'll get T'Sei and Andrew," McCoy called over his shoulder to Tarek, then frowned: the other man was not accompanying him. McCoy could get a cadet to help carry one of the two, but…

"There's something I need to do," Tarek said quietly, heading for the hangar. McCoy found a passing cadet and managed to distract them enough to receive no questions about the patients. The cadet seemed more silenced by the unnatural gray-green pallor that had crept across T'Sei's skin, the only apparent sign of her being in the critical ward. That and T'Sei's slight, sporadic twitching between long bursts of dead stillness.

Bones gave Andrew to one of the ship's personnel, making sure the cadet knew where to put T'Sei, and searched for Tarek. A little ways away, a figure leaned into a tiny ship whose sharp lines and burn marks were distinctly non-Federation. He could make out Tarek's face.

_That's what brought them all the way from the Neutral Zone?_

His incredulity left him as he could see who Tarek spoke to. A Romulan man—McCoy grinned; he recognized the centurion as Ruanek—lifted a staring boy around thirteen past the walkway while depositing a curly-haired toddler into Tarek's arms. Tarek quite seriously told the boy something the boy quite seriously replied to, and looked up. A fragment of his openness was still caught on Tarek's face as he walked over to McCoy and nodded.

"We're ready."


	19. Part XIX: Return

The _Lightwing_ was described by its crew to them as 'small', but Evine's ship could have easily fit in one of _Lightwing_'s cargo bays. Still, Andrew thought with the small part of his mind spared from exhaustion, it was about the size of a vessel he would like to work on. Someday, when his only concerns were his ship not getting blown up or anything...He let himself be lost in a rush of exhaustion and fell into dark, blissful sleep punctuated with worry over T'Sei's distance from him. Even that fell away eventually.

It was early morning, just before sunrise. As the space doors opened, McCoy, standing astride on the small Bridge, grinned; he understood T'Sei's trepidation about being caught leaving Starfleet; he had experienced something similar before she was born, when Spock's katra bounced around in his head.

_This isn't all that different._

It felt, in a way, like a beginning that should have happened before. Or it would feel that way if T'Sei's condition were anything other than critical—McCoy would at last see Spock and Vulcan again with his own eyes and mind, and everything would turn out well…if T'Sei survived, that was.

T'Sei was not even aware of light and darkness: the light of the ship she entered on a stretcher, the darkness of space before them. The oblivion within her mind was all-encompassing yet not unbroken, pierced with short moments of awareness. As she was taken onto the ship, she stiffened at the crowd of people boarding or helping. Awareness of them brushed against her consciousness in a faint unpleasantness like electric shock. When finally, she was relatively alone, she searched with her mind for Andrew, letting the tenuous connection fall away when the distance proved too great.

She was dimly aware, after some great length of time, of coming into contact with a comparative emptiness that was soothing in comparison to the chaos of other minds. It was familiar—Rhian. That fell into the background along with anything but the basic will to survive. She tried not to think about the pain and fire that prompted her to blindly attack an enemy female: Rhian was not an enemy. Rhian was part of her mind.

She did not hear Tarek and McCoy speaking.

They had retreated to what served temporarily as Sickbay: the _Lightwing_ had better medical facilities than Tarek was used to, beautifully efficient in comparison to many places McCoy had observed in his long career, but compact. Still, it didn't feel right to stare the large expanse of stars from the Bridge while the back of his mind belonged to Sickbay.

Andrew lay apart from the middle of the room; he wasn't in any critical condition, only asleep. Exhaustion drew faint lines of worry across his face. He looked unguarded, safe, but alone. McCoy glanced at him once to make sure he was alive, then concentrated on the others.

The monitor above T'Sei's bed was the most audible, beeping faster than made McCoy comfortable. The light from it washed against her unconscious face and clenched fist. The other hand connected to Rhian's forehead not in a mindmeld but in something approximately similar. Tarek, seeing this, had leaned forward to separate them, but McCoy stopped him.

"It's probably what's keeping them alive."

They stayed there, even when they approached Vulcan. It had been silent for a long while after the two doctors consulted with one another, and so McCoy could hear the faint sound as Andrew's eyes opened and he stood weakly.

"You okay, lieutenant?"

He looked slightly less exhausted than he had before, but still pale and drained.

"I'll be fine." He didn't look up as he spoke; his eyes rested on T'Sei. The meaning was clear.

Andrew sensed, rather than saw and felt Vulcan, preoccupied with an armful of T'Sei. He had gathered his arms around T'Sei, choosing to carry her rather than be accompanied by some cadet he didn't know, and blinked as the shuttlecraft landed on what appeared to be vast unbroken dawn-tinged gold-red. The sky and the ground were of such similar color—no-one had thought to mention it.

T'Sei's weight in his arms seemed like nothing. It probably was less than it should be, Andrew realized. She was paler than she should be, too, making that still-healing cut across her cheekbone a starkly dark green. The pon farr and the _katra_ dually drained her energy even as they gave it back. Andrew worried over what little might be left of T'Sei when this was through.

And so above him was the sky—he sensed it was great and open, something he rarely experienced or saw. There were few open spaces he had been in—few as large as most of this planet. He remembered the house by the river where he lived when he was small, and again, this brought his thoughts full-circle to T'Sei. Most of Vulcan thus went unnoticed. He caught brief glimpses and flashes of intense, logical eyes of Vulcans around him. There were few. The crew of the Lightwing had stayed at the ship, somehow sensing their presence would not be of help. And the heat of Vulcan was great and nearly suffocating. Andrew let it settle over his shoulders with almost relief. Anything so that she would live.

McCoy had to grab Andrew's shoulder to stop him from walking; he was on autopilot again. Too little sleep. They had arrived at a gated house that was a lighter fire-tinged shade of the planet's rock and sand. Andrew realized this must be where T'Sei lived.

"The _katra_ side of her problems seemed improved after she came into contact with Rhian. It's not enough, but she'll live until the fal tor pan or whatever it is when both people are alive," McCoy told the man. Andrew was at turns flushed and white, exhausted and able to carry T'Sei, and barely registered the woman McCoy spoke to—Saavik, T'Sei's mother—she gave him a faint nod that meant further questions—before he was directed upstairs. Just in case, McCoy administered another hypo of Lexorin to T'Sei, pulling the neck of her shirt to expose her shoulder. Andrew was already walking. T'Sei's breath hitched and her eyes flickered.

T'Sei's room was oddly bare. Andrew had expected it would contain more than it did—perhaps star charts or some childhood writings—but instead it had a great window to the desert outside that faced the rising sun, a computer console unobtrusive in the inner reaches of the room, a basin, and a bed that seemed like the frame was wood, scored with dark lines where a corner of it had once been broken.

Andrew removed his jacket—the heat, but no, the inward heat was suffocating—and flung it somewhere, away. He did not recall removing his shirt or pants and everything else. Heart beating wildly, he approached T'Sei. She seemed…less unconscious; her eyes attempted to open, then snapping awake, lit by wordless points of fire. He was awash in the same fire that could not be stopped; vague points of feeling were T'Sei's fingertips against his forehead. His other hand caught hers and abated some of the unstoppable force of whatever gripped her and in turn himself—sometime after witnessing some of what had happened in the Neutral Zone he had realized what that meant. He was not conscious of two separate bodies after their minds became indistinguishable in the heat and the pressure of the meld. He felt her hand hard enough to bruise against his fingers and his hips that latched against hers, saw her eyes—entirely hers, not overshadowed by katra exhaustion—and then was entirely neither Andrew or T'Sei but an overwhelming instinctual combination of both that entered T'Sei's mind and suffocated the fire theirein. Their breath, their hands, their minds, their bodies…all stayed inseparable.

Long past the sun rising again—he did not know how many sunrises had passed—Andrew lay in the vague indistinct borderland between both their minds, aware of the immobile pressure of T'Sei's hand and her breath rising and falling, and of the beginnings of light washing over their sleeping forms.


	20. Part XX: Epilogue: Many Universes

Tarek stood in the gathering sunlight outside the light-walled house, close to the door. It was a welcome change from the stone and solemnity of Mount Seleya: he had felt trapped both by physical pressure and by memory crowding in on him at that place. He had let the adepts take Rhian and hoped they would help her live for the next few hours before the refusion. Now he tried to do something that took more courage than he had needed for a while.

He stood, a lone figure against a wide horizon, shadowed by the sun which moved ever so slightly in the time elapsed in his thought.

It turned out he did not need to knock on the door. He stepped back as it cracked open and a woman stepped out. Her hand lightly closed the door. She looked up, finally seeing Tarek, fully lit slantwise by the soft beginnings of dawn. With the impact of what he knew, Tarek couldn't breathe for a moment. The design across the front of her tunic was unfamiliar, angular and…logical, he found was the only word to describe it. It took a moment for the fullness of her features to connect to the more compact and intense face he remembered. Her body, of course, was entirely changed. He had realized that countless times with the others.

What was oddly mesmerizing, as he examined her calm curiosity, was that he saw his own eyes. They were tempered with logic and reason he could not hope to attain, but locked with his.

For a moment he did not speak.

"Live long and prosper," he said after that moment in broken Vulcan. A minute movement: Saavik lifted an eyebrow.

No, the logic he had guessed at was actually a frozen amazement. Almost as if his half sister were in shock.

"I thought you had died," she stated. She had lapsed into the hybrid pidgin Romulan they had all spoken on Hellguard, though her cadence was strange.

Tarek flinched and looked away. "I was dying. Not dead."

The unspoken thought that an apology would do nothing to remedy the situation, and that none was needed, hung in the air almost tangibly.

His irrational anger settled with her expression, but not with her next words.

"I can't—" Saavik said very quietly, then closed her eyes and seemed to fight for control of her emotions. "It's been years since I remembered that part of myself I tried to leave behind. I felt like all the balance in myself would be gone if I held on to those memories.

"And now that years have passed, and I'm older, I understand…" she said, looking up again.

She looked as if she had forgotten what she would say, or perhaps the silence was planned. He didn't know this tempered, thoughtful aspect of her mind. He had known only a little of it, years and years ago—

_She had seen him once after she thought he was dead, but remembered nothing of it: age had changed his face, lengthened his body. Survival drove all thoughts of people out of her head, and years were forgotten. _

_She whirled around as he gripped her shoulders so she would face him. Her teeth were bared in instinctual defense, her eyes huge in a too-thin face. The deadly warning of sunrise settled in their awareness almost unconsciously. He would have to speak before they were found by the Angry Ones and hurt…the next few seconds were a rapidly closing window for escape that he could sense with a physical panic beginning to end._

_His voice was rough and scratched from unuse, and surprised her enough into stillness. "This is how you leave—"_

"Tarek," Saavik said. "How…?"

Her brow furrowed as she looked at his face in the increasing light. The way his eyes—

She had nearly come to the conclusion of what she suspected as he gave a brief, intense account of how he had gone to Romulus, how someone had tried to kill all of them, how Evine had nearly killed the assassin but died herself, telling him something just before.

"Most of the files on Hellguard were destroyed. Romulus was protecting itself against others using the information against them, or the project being continued. A few inconclusive lists of names, however, remained. DNA scans…

"The man is already dead. Perhaps he wanted to destroy the files himself but was stopped. You would not want to know who he is. Saavik, you and I share a father. I'm your half-brother."

Such was her Vulcan composure that he saw no outward reaction but silence. But Saavik was shaken, looking at the man she had known as a dying boy in a new light. Her head tilted, her eyes tracing the contours of his face unconsciously. She found herself looking for differences, how the angle of his mouth was more Vulcan…and found she was trying illogically to separate the two halves, and that she did not wish to know the faces of her parents. Or their identity.

That other knowledge burned painfully inside Tarek, but he let it settle and drift away with the wind. It would become forgotten, or he would learn from it. The great fire of the sun transforming Vulcan and the expression in Saavik's eyes signaled some great change, some beginning.

She nodded at him, understanding. They stood outside as the shadows changed, awaiting the signal for the beginning of the _katra_ return. Their thoughts and their expressions crossing their faces briefly erased any difference between the two, until they seemed the same against the sun.

Some change in the light woke T'Sei. Sunrise hit her full in the face. Where before, it would have burned, now it felt oddly cool. She looked at it for a moment. Perhaps it was the silence, or the openness of Vulcan that seemed strange to her, but the calmness overall of her childhood home gave her a strange sense of déjà vu even as her mind was soothed by it.

T'Sei found herself distracted by the light against Andrew's body. His face, facing upwards, was lined by it. His arm and his side pressed against hers, and his fingers were still lightly tangled in hers, emanating a light pleasant warmth. She blinked, feeling similar to as if she were walking with two legs but calling them one—her mental distinguishing of differences between Andrew and herself had subtly changed, not so separate as before….wait.

She focused on this difference and her eyebrows shot up. A needle of panic and indecision shot through her, only minutely dulled as she found that Andrew was looking at her with half-open eyes.

"You know, your eyes are unfairly pretty," she told him after staring for a minute. Gray, with a little vein of blue running through the right side of his irises, as she hadn't really noticed before. His face was distractingly well-formed. Quiet, but retaining some of that happiness he seemed effused with in what she had seen in glimpses of his childhood in his mind: he was a reminder of herself as she had been before, without the instinctual weight of Rhian's _katra_.

Andrew chuckled with that almost-weariness between wakefulness and contentment. T'Sei rested her head against his chest for a moment before moving away and shaking her head free of distracting thoughts. She leaned on one elbow and twisted to look at Andrew with a more serious expression. What she had found that was different she hadn't expected.

"I don't want to get married, yet," she began. Andrew looked thoughtful. He hadn't even thought of that; it had been the least pressing thought in his mind. He had had other things at the forefront, not the least of which had been T'Sei's survival.

He let her continue.

"It's something I've been irrationally afraid of since my childhood. Vulcans are expected to have arranged marriages when they're seven. My parents let me choose not to do that. But…that's around when I started learning the horror stories about _sa-mekh_—"—T'Sei translated the unconscious Vulcan word and Andrew looked less puzzled—"—and his original bondmate's failed marriage ceremony and also realized what the hell happened on Genesis. Understandably, I've been afraid of any official commitment going wrong…"

He was moving his paired fingers against hers. "Stop it," she told him, smiling.

Andrew nodded, not at stopping. "We have a lot of time ahead of us."

"I don't think you understand why I brought this up. In Vulcan terms, we're already bonded, married, informally." She cut off his question, continuing, "That's not just some ceremonial process. Our minds are linked."

He looked at her in all seriousness, eyes intense. "I know."

"And—" she began—

"I knew perhaps before it was possible to know that I was already in love with you. It was…when we met. It felt like there was something like what there is now, some connection that I can't entirely describe. I'll stay with you. We don't have to be married. It's different than that; in a way, we are. In any case, I'm twenty-two and you're twenty-one. I can wait. Happily," he said, grinning, most of his sleepiness gone.

T'Sei nodded. Inexplicably, a small part of herself seemed to fall back in place, the edges merging with the gap that had grown, the scar healing. She remembered the origin of that scar and let the other, weaker bond go in silence. It let go, dissipating away from the outreaches of her awareness until it was gone entirely. In the silence that followed, she slid her other leg over his and her body over her chest so that her head was just beneath his, his heartbeat audible and comforting. Her mental awareness looked over the merging of their minds, the little bridge between them that was the bond. It felt right.

Andrew put his arms around T'Sei and they nearly fell into sleep…but sleep was far from coming. They had slept for approximately 2.16 days, T'Sei noted. After other things. Andrew tilted his head towards T'Sei's. She could sense he was smiling as he kissed her warmly, but was surprised when their hands joined once more and Andrew whispered something in Vulcan.

_Parted and never parted…_

T'Sei looked at him askance, amazed. "You know Vulcan," he said. "I heard it in your mind."

She grinned and kissed him back.

A few hours later, Andrew stood in the clothing he had worn before, and T'Sei, an odd mixture of solemnity and euphoria, wearing a white robe with a star-like geometric design on the front and back. Their entwined fingers connected them both, as did the combination of weariness and energy as they walked.

T'Sei looked around, puzzled, then saw the open door. She walked outside, Andrew, of course, having to follow.

Tarek's voice was already audible.

"…Maiek and Rhys…if they could…"

Her mother and Tarek stopped speaking and turned to face T'Sei. Tarek seemed a little confused: he hadn't ever seen T'Sei this calm; there had always been some instinctual force guiding her inexorably to action. He felt suddenly out of place; in many ways, T'Sei, as did Saavik, seemed to belong to this planet that was entirely different than anywhere Tarek had been. He had no true home…the thought disappeared, however, in powerful relief. T'Sei was alive. And Rhian would live, he hoped with his entire being.

Andrew released T'Sei's hand with a slight look of embarrassment. His face had been entirely red earlier when he met Saavik's eyes. She had some fierce, protective expression on her face that he misread—ignoring any Vulcan decorum, she hugged T'Sei hard. She hadn't heard the purpose behind T'Sei's voyage to Romulus, but knew she had been changed and would reveal everything in time. T'Sei remembered being very young, in her mother's arms while Saavik spoke to Rhian…she could not lose the sense of everything having changed.

And everything remaining the same. Vulcan still held an odd pull on her, just as those spaces between certain stars, where planets used to be, had drawn her intense curiosity in childhood.

The long stretch of sand between ShiKahr and Gol, where the _fal tor pan_ would take place, was not something to be endured; impossibly, to T'Sei, it was almost something unnoticed. Not punishment but reflection. The wind swept across the robe T'Sei wore and lit upon unreadable thoughts of the past. She felt simultaneously washed clean and empty, an unsettling absence of thought. She could feel her mother had closed her eyes, and half-remembered the tension ever-present in her limbs days before, even when she did not know she would fight or what she was up against, and felt the shadow of pressure against her feet: running, younger, across burning sand—not T'Sei, but Rhian—and Saavik—

Rhian's _katra_ settled within her, almost seemed to separate from her thoughts a little. Once again, T'Sei felt oddly light, as if she would leave the ground, her perspective on reality changed. The déjà vu was a strong presence behind her eyes: as herself, nearly without any mind but her own, she was once again connected to how she had been as a child…

The Forge was unbroken silence but for Andrew's slightly labored breathing. She offered to carry him but he declined, instead leaning on her slightly. That made her think of Tarek, which made her think of fifteen years ago…

T'Sei's thoughts settled into wordlessness and silence. There was a great stillness to the air at Gol; it was not charged with anything at the moment except perhaps thought. Adepts and priestesses and acolytes stood there, eyes powerfully concentrated. Tarek broke off from near Saavik and found Rhian being supported to stand by two of the priestesses. He helped, unnecessarily, lay her on one of the great blocks of stone at the altar, swiftly silent as the priestesses in his movements, but pausing before he was guided back and looking at her face. It was already burned into his memory…but some of his memories, again, would become hers and fill in the gaps between those she had parted with. The adepts at Mount Seleya had helped reawaken that knowledge in him almost as an afterthought. It formed a distinct, hopeful presence in the back of his mind.

T'Sei, standing in front of T'Lar, suddenly felt alone, singular, powerfully so. Her presence was like a weight.

"I ask for the refusion, the _fal tor pan_," she said.

T'Lar acknowledged. If memory of the same words from Sarek ran through her mind, it was unrevealed in her gaze. Rhian, unconscious, parents unknown, was spoken for by Tarek, who assured that Rhian would accept her returned _katra_ even with the danger; there had been danger in relinquishing it, and danger in coming to Vulcan, and danger in what they had faced…

The silence grew. T'Sei walked to the other block of stone and lay flat upon it, closing her eyes. She felt T'Lar's fingers branching across the gap between Rhian and T'Sei's mind, and shivered. She couldn't help thinking of Andrew. They had been in a meld…the thought flew powerfully away with the presence of another mind, the years an impossible weight of logic and different thought. There was a slight pause in connection to Rhian's mind.

T'Lar had said nothing about Rhian being half-Romulan. After all, hadn't Spock, half-human, less Vulcan genetically than a half-Romulan, gone through the _fal tor pan_ successfully? The thought _Romulan_ did not cross her mind in T'Sei's awareness, nor did frustration. There was just a pause. A long one.

The world inverted, gripped T'Sei, the sky changing colors, then dropping into blackness. Everything she had ever seen rushed past at dizzying speed. She gripped the manual controls of a ship spiraling into a crash, the horizon slamming close—she could not move. She looked upwards with strangely distorted, hazy vision to see her mother's face streaked with confusing tears and another face beyond hers immobile, shocked, amazed—Spock much younger than T'Sei had ever seen him—she fell into Andrew's mind, into her own mind—she was running desperately to escape someone on Hellguard, the sky darkening with her vision and threatening with death—

Other, indescribable worlds. T'Sei hung somewhere between awareness and consciousness, somewhere unformed and understood. She did not know what she was seeing yet understood it perfectly.

Her eyes, opening, saw the sky and the span of billions of stars, unable to describe or understand sight, then understanding, expanding, her understanding nearly ageless then slamming her eyes closed again.

Consciousness, different and the same, returned with the coming dawn of the next day…

Spock staggered finally out of the ship he had come to know like it was another hand or another mind, the confining walls that had trapped and liberated him through the myriad universes. His head was still spinning after the rough touchdown that hadn't been balanced by logical thought. The sand had not settled, but swirled roughly like his mind; his third eyelid snapped over his eyes and protected them from the worst.

Only by memory did he make it back to his and Saavik's house. Even blind, even barely conscious, he knew the way. The familiarity of everything was unsettling. He half expected the ground itself to become threatening, as it had on one universe, to drop beneath his feet in an uncontrollable chasm…but no, this was where he had started. But everything, in its familiarity, looked different.

Saavik heard the door open. She stood completely still as she separated the near-sunburns, shock, and difference in expression from Spock's face and narrowed her eyes slightly in confusion: he looked at her like he hadn't seen her in years. He seemed to take in T'Sei, who had grown tired from standing and now leaned against Andrew in her white robes still. Andrew absently stroked a thumb across the back of T'Sei's hand, his face marked as well by exhaustion. A man Spock had never seen but who looked oddly familiar—he could see resemblances between his face and Saavik's—sat also, conversing with an older McCoy than Spock had last seen. But this, Spock noticed for only a moment.

Saavik wordlessly took both of Spock's hands in her own and widened her eyes: she could already feel some of the shock of his thoughts, the difference…

McCoy coughed a little, meaningfully. "Mind explaining where you've been, Spock?"

"I have been, for this past year, in an alternate universe. Many alternate universes, in fact, in the attempt to return to my own timeline…"

He looked at Saavik, who had grown still. "There was one the same as this where we married approximately forty-five years later from now and had no child…this one I returned to most frequently when trying to get back to our own: it is the closest approximation to ours. In another, Dr McCoy was younger, on Earth in the 21st century, and did not know me when I spoke to him, but that was the only change I noticed.

"And there was one in which I did not exist."

Saavik started violently, her calm shaken. Perhaps she remembered Genesis…But from the look in her eyes, this was not entirely new information. Spock had died before…_but to never exist…_

There was an idea from Earth centuries back that if you held out your hands you could touch millions of other universes at once, they were so close to our own. And a single change in outcome would cause one universe to split from the other, or a timeline to change…

T'Sei saw her father and knew she would question him about events farther in the past. She had gone curiously still in thought. Andrew's thoughts were different: he knew about alternate universes, and did not wonder about them much. Instead, he thought of the _Lightwing_ departing today to return to the Academy, and the months he and T'Sei would spend on Vulcan in recovery. Time for thought, but he had the strange feeling that when he returned, he would be entirely changed. He had dreamed he looked into his own eyes, saw himself older, and was bound to his own emotion, the sadness fixed upon his face. He held the hand of someone indistinct, walking on the horizon where the red sky met the red ground of the Forge, his footsteps burning away. And so his thoughts were in another time…

Saavik walked down the hallway, steps measured, to the room she and Spock shared. The window to the desert was wide open, the silence reflecting her thoughts. Somewhere where the horizon met with the sky her dreams merged with other universes that circled like a _shavokh_ in the gathering sunset.


End file.
